An N-word is stalking our lives. It is not nuclear, nor nitrates, though the effect is poisonous. Everywhere it is sneaking up on us. A worthy Sunday publication asserted that its effect was more powerful than advertising. Be afraid for old-fashioned virtues like sincerity or hard work, or picking friends because you like them, for we are living in the age of - Networking, writes Angela Long.
Networking, for the childlike and the good still unfamiliar with this contemporary obligation, is using personal contacts to forward business projects, or an individual's career. Since I leapt from the safety of the mother-ship Irish Times into the murky depths of self-employment, the N-word haunts my dreams.
To get work, network: the advice comes from all sides, from artistic types in the Gaeltacht, from family in the Australian suburbs, even from respectable elderly ones whom I would have expected to believe that networking was some sort of charming crochet or embroidery. "Get networking!" everybody says, and my heart sinks.
For people in mainstream business there are lots of laid-on networking opportunities, at conferences, product launches, chambers of commerce, and so on. Here there is a hybrid quality to the event, in that it is legitimate business but with a window of opportunity that can be pushed open by those with social skills and an ability to sugar the pill of self or corporate advancement.
For folk without that framework you have to create your own network, win friends and influence people. Networking, naturally enough, can be found on the net, with sites (mostly American) recommending net-networking events, such as "a cocktail party with a twist - one-part social event, one part business mixer!" Whee!
"Why hello ..."
Networking holds horrors for me because it is something I feel instinctively I will not be good at, like lap-dancing or politics. "Why hello, Joe! How are you! What can you do for me?" Or standing at the cocktail party and seeing an important editor on the other side of the room - do you abandon the person you are small-talking to in mid-sentence, march up to the desirable group, "Hello everyone, how are we all, who is going to give me a lucrative commission?"
Yes, I know it's not quite like that, and subtlety must be employed. But where is the line drawn where subtle networking becomes invisible networking, so that the long conversation about the movies of Almodovar which you have conducted with a source of potential employment is remembered warmly by them, the only problem being they can't recall what sort of work you said you did. And where is that business card?
But I also feel uneasy about it because it seems that business and the corporate imperative is encroaching further on leisure time, on personal time when the demands of capitalism can be shelved for the satisfactions of the spirit. Why can't we do business deals in a business atmosphere, and then let our hair down at parties.
Richard Marsh is in town, and a networking guru. He is going to teach us all how to network effectively, especially saddos like me lurking in the corner with the one person in the room they knew already. Marsh, a business consultant and management trainer, gave a seminar on the subject at a Dublin hotel two weeks ago which I missed, unfortunately, but he was kind enough to offer a few insights subsequently, as he rode in a taxi to a lunch appointment.
"I don't lecture, I run interactive sessions, and I try to help people with techniques," he said. "There are a lot of common sense things, like don't stand around with the people you know when you are at a corporate event. How do you tell people the pertinent facts about your company without rabbiting on? And how to remember their names, and facts about them that you bring up the next time you meet."
This all sounded very like one William J. Clinton, who went far with his networking, though not knowing when was too far with female networkees was almost fatal.
Big Bill was reputed to have his networking down to a fine art, even as a university student, with a sophisticated card indexing system. On his mini-cards he wrote a person's name, name of their spouse, whether he had seduced them - no, that is made up, but some other fact such as "sailing", "six kids", "Quaker", would help jog his memory for the next time they met.
But isn't the whole concept of networking a little too much? Putting the business imperative in to what is supposedly enjoyable and unpressured social contact?
Wake up and smell the coffee, Richard Marsh might say, except he is far too well-mannered. "Networking is a very effective business to business contact."
Networkophobia
However the phenomenon of the networking-o-phobe is not isolated. Marsh did a survey of what he calls professional service clients, lawyers, accountants, architects and workers of that type, and asked them about networking. Less than 10 per cent of senior people liked it.
"They were uncomfortable about going out and getting business that way," he said. "They love the professional work but not the marketing side of it, which I just call selling. They don't even like the expression, selling, it is something alien to them."
That is an attitude to which I can relate, like a lot of us in the woossy world of journalism. We tell ourselves that we are providing a public service, are the noble Fourth Estate, are over and above the ordinary commercial concerns: that is all eyewash, after all, a newspaper is a product.
Selling, ergh, perish the thought, has to be done as much as reporting, ruminating and pontificating. There are two sides to communication, the same as any transaction, be it ideas or money.
Right: I have my lines, now I'm off to the dentist to make sure that BIG networking grin is equally polished.