Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Networking While On a Business Trip
Wow, I can't believe it's almost been a year since my last post! Some of you may know that I've relocated from the New York / Connecticut area to Silicon Valley last April. I'm working at Google, where I'm the Head of the Entertainment & Media vertical for AdWords, within the Online Sales and Operations group.
Last week, I traveled down to Los Angeles to interview first year students at my alma mater, the UCLA Anderson School of Management for MBA internships at Google.
As Keith Ferrazzi recommends in his book, "Never Eat Alone", I took the advantage of the business trip to reconnect with many friends and acquaintances. Prior to my trip, I emailed many friends based in LA, to see if they wanted to meet up for dinner. Seven of us ended up having a good sushi dinner at Hide Sushi, on Sawtelle Blvd. It was a diverse group, consisting of my friends from Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, Harvard College, NAAAP and Avery Dennison. I had not seen most of these friends for many years.
I also met up with one of my mentors from UCLA Anderson, Bruce Rognlien for breakfast. Bruce was the leader of program within the Entrepreneur Association at UCLA Anderson called "TEC On-Campus", which is now "Vistage On-Campus". This was my absolutely favorite extra-curricular activity while in B-School. Bruce was a retired entrepreneur and former CEO of Associated Travel.
Every month, our whole TEC group (15 of us students plus Bruce) spent a Friday together. Bruce would make appointments for us to visit a prominent entrepreneur or business leader based in the LA area. The entrepreneur would speak to us in the morning very candidly about his or her career successes and failures, and then have lunch with us. In the afternoon, Bruce led us through various career development discussions, or gave us time on the agenda to pitch our ideas for building a start-up to our peers and receive honest feedback. During the quarter, Bruce also met with us one-to-one for personal career and life counseling. Needless to say, I've really looked forward to our monthly TEC meetings and treasured all of Bruce's advice. To this day, I've never found a networking group quite like it. So, it was great to catch up with Bruce at breakfast last week.
That's part of the reason I wanted to share this with everyone. Most of us will go on occasional business trips. It's very easy to literally "Eat Alone", or with colleagues that you see frequently. However, I would recommend following Keith Ferrazzi's advice and plan to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances (or even invite some new people to meet up).
Another recommendation is that if you're a successful entrepreneur, I would highly recommend joining Vistage, since the Vistage On-Campus groups are modeled after the normal Vistage groups.
Happy networking!
-Josh Li
By the way, I've run out of LinkedIn invites to connect, but am an open networker on LinkedIn. Feel free to invite me to connect to you on LinkedIn and I'll accept.
Last week, I traveled down to Los Angeles to interview first year students at my alma mater, the UCLA Anderson School of Management for MBA internships at Google.
As Keith Ferrazzi recommends in his book, "Never Eat Alone", I took the advantage of the business trip to reconnect with many friends and acquaintances. Prior to my trip, I emailed many friends based in LA, to see if they wanted to meet up for dinner. Seven of us ended up having a good sushi dinner at Hide Sushi, on Sawtelle Blvd. It was a diverse group, consisting of my friends from Boston Chinese Evangelical Church, Harvard College, NAAAP and Avery Dennison. I had not seen most of these friends for many years.
I also met up with one of my mentors from UCLA Anderson, Bruce Rognlien for breakfast. Bruce was the leader of program within the Entrepreneur Association at UCLA Anderson called "TEC On-Campus", which is now "Vistage On-Campus". This was my absolutely favorite extra-curricular activity while in B-School. Bruce was a retired entrepreneur and former CEO of Associated Travel.
Every month, our whole TEC group (15 of us students plus Bruce) spent a Friday together. Bruce would make appointments for us to visit a prominent entrepreneur or business leader based in the LA area. The entrepreneur would speak to us in the morning very candidly about his or her career successes and failures, and then have lunch with us. In the afternoon, Bruce led us through various career development discussions, or gave us time on the agenda to pitch our ideas for building a start-up to our peers and receive honest feedback. During the quarter, Bruce also met with us one-to-one for personal career and life counseling. Needless to say, I've really looked forward to our monthly TEC meetings and treasured all of Bruce's advice. To this day, I've never found a networking group quite like it. So, it was great to catch up with Bruce at breakfast last week.
That's part of the reason I wanted to share this with everyone. Most of us will go on occasional business trips. It's very easy to literally "Eat Alone", or with colleagues that you see frequently. However, I would recommend following Keith Ferrazzi's advice and plan to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances (or even invite some new people to meet up).
Another recommendation is that if you're a successful entrepreneur, I would highly recommend joining Vistage, since the Vistage On-Campus groups are modeled after the normal Vistage groups.
Happy networking!
-Josh Li
By the way, I've run out of LinkedIn invites to connect, but am an open networker on LinkedIn. Feel free to invite me to connect to you on LinkedIn and I'll accept.
