What They Still Don't Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H. McCormack

Author:Mark H. McCormack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2. Who are your friends, and where are they going?

One of the nice things about having friends in business is that they grow with you—and vice versa. Yet it puzzles me how often people fail to realize this and use it to their advantage.

This is a common problem in sales and marketing organizations, particularly small entrepreneurial outfits where much of the business grows out of personal relationships developed by the founder.

I noticed this several years ago when a friend described his company to me. He was forty at the time, building up a young, energetic organization where the executives were, on balance, ten years younger than he was. He was constantly urging his people to develop contacts of their own. They would complain to him, with some merit, that it was easy for him at forty, with his title and experience, to cultivate relationships with CEOs and division heads, but they were too young to do the same.

Now that his people are in their late thirties and early forties, many of them are still missing out on opportunities. They still don’t appreciate that the friends they started out with have acquired clout, that their roommate in college is a decision maker. Their focus on relationships hasn’t varied or expanded as they’ve gotten older. They continue to entertain their original business friends, not realizing that it’s overkill, that one less lunch each month doesn’t mean they’ve lost a friend.

If you really want to know where you are and where you’re going, look at your friends or clients. Who are they? Where are they going?

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