The Science of Networking: How to Build Meaningful Connections
Naomi opened the bottom drawer of her desk looking for anyone who could help her. What she found instead were forty-one business cards - three years of conferences, mixers, and follow-up emails that had produced almost nothing. She had done everything the advice told her to do. None of it had worked.
The problem wasn't Naomi. It was the model she'd been taught: networking as a transaction, a card exchanged for a card, a favor banked against a future ask. The actual mechanism behind durable professional relationships turns out to be almost the opposite - and the research proves it.
Drawing on Mark Granovetter's landmark study on the strength of weak ties, Adam Grant's research on givers and takers, and a 300-year-old case study in Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia discussion club, The Science of Networking dismantles the exhausting, transactional model most people were handed by default and replaces it with something considerably more sustainable - and more human.
You'll learn why the people who seem to "just have a knack" for networking aren't more naturally likable - they've simply stopped optimizing for the exchange and started optimizing for the relationship. You'll learn what to actually say in a first conversation, how to follow up without feeling transactional, and how to build a wide, genuinely maintained network without it becoming a second job.
Naomi's forty-one cards are gone. What replaced them wasn't a bigger drawer. It was a much smaller, much more real list of people who would actually pick up the phone.
This book shows you how to build that list - starting today.
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