Knowledge Centre
Business Networks Podcast
5th June 2008 Duration: 4m 49s File size: 2.2MBBusiness guru Colin Barrow explains how online networks can help you to build your team, develop your knowledge or use your contacts to extend the service you offer to your clients.
Tags: Homeworking, Start-up
The MORE TH>N BUSINESS Podcast with Colin Barrow.
Being well connected is what business is all about. And if you’re a small business, or you work on your own, it’s even more important.
The old cliché that success is about ‘who you know’ becomes interesting all over again now online networking is playing an increasingly important role for small business. Colin Barrow – Business author: It hits a lot of the hot buttons really! It certainly hits this big hot button of people wanting information and wanting to do this in their own time. Jane Markham – Podcats: Colin Barrow is the former head of the Enterprise Group at Cranfield School of Management and the author of many successful books on business Colin: One of the critical things that differentiates successful small businesses from less successful small businesses is their capacity to build teams that can function well together. The ingredients that make a team work are shared goals and the capacity to communicate effectively. Quite a lot of the time, in a small business, the direction has to be ‘discerned’ it can’t be ‘dictated’ and it’s this communication and this informal communication that’s going to help make that work well and effectively. Jane: And that’s something that the internet is enabling? Colin: It provides a platform to be able talk informally without structure, so that people can talk about different things and so they can leak over into different areas and spread it around. That’s opposed to say - a seminar based discussion where everyone knows what the topic is and it’s structured. What you need is something completely unstructured where people can spill over, grab the threads and pull them in different directions and go where they lead to. Jane: Of course that’s where a good chat at the coffee machine used to play its part. Colin: In a big company you naturally have that process. People are moving around all over the place and they’re being transferred from one department to another department. But for small companies, very often, people don’t have that kind of freedom of movement. This is a way of helping to overcome that ‘lock in’ problem that many small businesses have in terms of being boxed in to their present knowledge-base. Jane: There are the traditional ways of doing this. Colin: You can be a member of a trade association, you can be in the Chamber of Commerce, you can join the Institute of Directors, you can go on a training programme like the ones I’ve been involved in running - and all of those are really good ways of building up your network, of getting new experience and finding out about new things. They just have a couple of deficiencies – one is they are usually pretty expensive and secondly they usually require quite a big investment of physical time. Jane: And online networking sites are the boom area at the moment – particularly those tailored directly to business - like Everywoman and LinkedUp. Colin: All the research shows that actually the most expensive bit of business is getting customers and the difficulty is that when you’ve got a customer, if you’re a small business, usually you haven’t got much to sell them. There’s a very good chance that most of the customers you’ll be dealing with are bigger businesses that have a wide range of things that they’d like to buy but you don’t have them. So informal networks, where you can share that knowledge, are really useful ways of extending your service. These networks are also useful ways of appearing more valuable to the client.
It hits a lot of the hot buttons – it certainly hits the big hot button of people wanting information and wanting to do this in their own time. They really don’t like going away for weekend training courses. They do it because there is no other way and if there is another way of getting it – if there is another way of getting knowledge, experience and sharing knowledge they leap at it. And this is a marvellous way, when people have 10 minutes or 5 minutes overnight they can whack something in and they can get information out. And really if small businesses are going to compete they have got to have a way of getting this knowledge. Jane: And it’s good to know there are others like you out there. Colin: Loneliness is the thing that keeps coming through in all the research, in everything we do, people are saying it’s lonely. We’re on our own. Many have come out of big businesses where they were used to the collegiate life. They’ve always had people – if they’ve come across a problem they’ve always been able to talk to people and say ‘oh gosh Bill over in Tokyo had a problem just like that two years ago’ – well now there’s no Bill in Tokyo for these guys. Jane: No – Bill’s online!
If you’d like information about the services MORE TH>N BUSINESS can offer small business go to www.morethanbusiness.com or call 08000 294 8527. For your protection calls may be recorded or monitored.
This is a Podcats production for MORE TH>N BUSINESS.
Being well connected is what business is all about. And if you’re a small business, or you work on your own, it’s even more important.
The old cliché that success is about ‘who you know’ becomes interesting all over again now online networking is playing an increasingly important role for small business. Colin Barrow – Business author: It hits a lot of the hot buttons really! It certainly hits this big hot button of people wanting information and wanting to do this in their own time. Jane Markham – Podcats: Colin Barrow is the former head of the Enterprise Group at Cranfield School of Management and the author of many successful books on business Colin: One of the critical things that differentiates successful small businesses from less successful small businesses is their capacity to build teams that can function well together. The ingredients that make a team work are shared goals and the capacity to communicate effectively. Quite a lot of the time, in a small business, the direction has to be ‘discerned’ it can’t be ‘dictated’ and it’s this communication and this informal communication that’s going to help make that work well and effectively. Jane: And that’s something that the internet is enabling? Colin: It provides a platform to be able talk informally without structure, so that people can talk about different things and so they can leak over into different areas and spread it around. That’s opposed to say - a seminar based discussion where everyone knows what the topic is and it’s structured. What you need is something completely unstructured where people can spill over, grab the threads and pull them in different directions and go where they lead to. Jane: Of course that’s where a good chat at the coffee machine used to play its part. Colin: In a big company you naturally have that process. People are moving around all over the place and they’re being transferred from one department to another department. But for small companies, very often, people don’t have that kind of freedom of movement. This is a way of helping to overcome that ‘lock in’ problem that many small businesses have in terms of being boxed in to their present knowledge-base. Jane: There are the traditional ways of doing this. Colin: You can be a member of a trade association, you can be in the Chamber of Commerce, you can join the Institute of Directors, you can go on a training programme like the ones I’ve been involved in running - and all of those are really good ways of building up your network, of getting new experience and finding out about new things. They just have a couple of deficiencies – one is they are usually pretty expensive and secondly they usually require quite a big investment of physical time. Jane: And online networking sites are the boom area at the moment – particularly those tailored directly to business - like Everywoman and LinkedUp. Colin: All the research shows that actually the most expensive bit of business is getting customers and the difficulty is that when you’ve got a customer, if you’re a small business, usually you haven’t got much to sell them. There’s a very good chance that most of the customers you’ll be dealing with are bigger businesses that have a wide range of things that they’d like to buy but you don’t have them. So informal networks, where you can share that knowledge, are really useful ways of extending your service. These networks are also useful ways of appearing more valuable to the client.
It hits a lot of the hot buttons – it certainly hits the big hot button of people wanting information and wanting to do this in their own time. They really don’t like going away for weekend training courses. They do it because there is no other way and if there is another way of getting it – if there is another way of getting knowledge, experience and sharing knowledge they leap at it. And this is a marvellous way, when people have 10 minutes or 5 minutes overnight they can whack something in and they can get information out. And really if small businesses are going to compete they have got to have a way of getting this knowledge. Jane: And it’s good to know there are others like you out there. Colin: Loneliness is the thing that keeps coming through in all the research, in everything we do, people are saying it’s lonely. We’re on our own. Many have come out of big businesses where they were used to the collegiate life. They’ve always had people – if they’ve come across a problem they’ve always been able to talk to people and say ‘oh gosh Bill over in Tokyo had a problem just like that two years ago’ – well now there’s no Bill in Tokyo for these guys. Jane: No – Bill’s online!
If you’d like information about the services MORE TH>N BUSINESS can offer small business go to www.morethanbusiness.com or call 08000 294 8527. For your protection calls may be recorded or monitored.
This is a Podcats production for MORE TH>N BUSINESS.
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