I saw a very insightful post from Konstantin Guericke, CoFounder of LinkedIn on MyLinkedInPowerForum. He writes (reposted by permission): ________________________________________________________________________

Message: 1 Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 22:09:35 -0700 From: "Konstantin"

Subject: The power is in the network you already have Virtually all professionals nod enthusiastically that "relationships matter," but only a small group heeds the advice below.

They start networking when they have a need. But that's a really bad time to do it.

One of the core networking principles has been that you need to network proactively, meaning meeting lots of new people and build relationships, so you have people you can fall back on you need a job, an expert, an investor or a business partner.

 And you have to network with lots of people because you just don't know what kind of relationship you may need. And many networking sites try to encourage this old way by being a sort of virtual networking event where you can get to know lots of people.

LinkedIn turns this on its head by focusing on relationship management and giving members access to the people you need through the people you know.

The people in your personal networks are contacts on demand. As long as you have strong relationships with, say, 100 people, you have on-demand access to hundreds of thousands of people-far more than you could ever meet through networking.

So, what this means is that LinkedIn obviates the need to network in the traditional sense.

Unless you are a young professional just getting started on your career, you already have a network just from working-this is a network based on co-workers, bosses, clients, business partners, investors, etc. And this network is strong because these people know the good work you have done and are capable of doing.

 In the past, this network was often insufficient because it was just 30 or 100 or 300 people, depending on the type of profession and length of your career.

The person you needed would often not be among this group. But through LinkedIn, you have access to an on-demand network, so once you have brought the group of people who know you and your work onto LinkedIn (and these days, many are already on, so it's much easier than two years ago), you can just relax and know that you can reach the people you need when you need them-without having to get to know them all "just in case."

This is a fairly radical notion that transcends most existing networking philosophy. And it allows you to focus on working, rather than networking.

 One the network of people who know your work is built, when you need someone, search and you will find.

 Ask for an introduction, and you will get in touch along as your connection provides a strong introduction and you have a win-win proposition.

 As you help your connections reach the people they want to meet, you strengthen your bonds with both parties you are introducing.

 The best way to expand your list of connections is simply to continue to do work and do it well.

Your connections list will grow, and each connection will be an avenue to thousands of new contacts that are accessible on-demand, when you need them. -Konstantin Konstantin Guericke VP Marketing and Co-Founder, LinkedIn Professional Profile

This is very consistent with some of the themes in our book. I think that spending endless hours chatting at cocktail parties or chatting in online communities is a waste of time from a professional point of view. It's defensible as recreation, but not for business development. Whatever your job is, do your job well, and success will flow from that. What counts is not the number of people who know you, but the number of people who know you, trust you, and will pay you to do what you do.

Career Acceleration | General | Personal Productivity | Social Software

Here's a modeling tool to look at relationships between directors of major life science related companies. Go to www.recap.com and click on "power brokers of biotech", and you'll be taken to a real-time building screen. This is a free public version of similar analyses of power networks available at Capital IQ, LinkSV, and TheyRule.net. Via David Carpe on SOCNET .

General | Private Equity Investing

How to write keyword-rich electronic resumes www.easyjob.net/resume/scannable-resumes.html Learn how to write electronic resumes that scan well and are easy to post to resume banks http://www.easyjob.net/resume/resumes-internet.html There are many more resume articles at www.easyjob.net/resume via Fernando Rodriguez

General | Career Acceleration

Via SpeakerNetNews.com and elevatingyourbusiness.com: "Want a way to easily check your links that is 97% accurate and won't cost you a dime? http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html . It will go through a site in no time and produce a report to get you fixing those broken links or redirected links in no time. It will check the links from your site to your site, too. Sometimes they can be broken."

Social Software

Daniel Akst has a fascinating piece on how much, and how, Looks do matter. The best observation:

Although looks in mating still matter much more to men than to women, the importance of appearance appears to be rising on both sides of the gender divide.

In a fascinating cross-generational study of mating preferences, every 10 years different groups of men and women were asked to rank 18 characteristics they might want enhanced in a mate.

 The importance of good looks rose “dramatically" for both men and women from 1939 to 1989, the period of the study, according to David M. Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas.

 On a scale of 1 to 3, the importance men gave to good looks rose from 1.50 to 2.11. But for women, the importance of good looks in men rose from 0.94 to 1.67.

In other words, women in 1989 considered a man’s looks even more important than men considered women’s looks 50 years earlier.

Since the 1930s, Buss writes, “physical appearance has gone up in importance for men and women about equally, corresponding with the rise in television, fashion magazines, advertising, and other media depictions of attractive models."

Personal Productivity

From TheDamnBlog.com:

Ever wonder how to hack an elevator to own it for your trip and not be stopped on any other floors? "The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor. This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work, but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose, And this concludes Hacking Elevators 101!

Although I suggest acting on this hack would be very inconsiderate to the people on the intervening floors.

Personal Productivity

I recently had the chance to play with the latest versions of several software packages which I use heavily: Act! by Best Software; eGrabber by eGrabber Inc.; and Cardscan from Cardscan, Inc. Disclosure: these companies were kind enough to send me sample copies of their latest models. ACT! 2005 for Windows is a comprehensive tool for managing your key business and personal relationships.

I have been using various versions of the program since 1996. As with previous versions, you have a great deal of power to slice and dice your data in countless ways.

 You can customize many different components of the program to make it work exactly the way you want.

The new version includes some very useful features that previously I had to create kludges to simulate.

 For example, you now have one-click access to all of your open opportunities (i.e., sales leads).

The bad news: the program is slow, even on my fast Dell with 1 gigabyte of memory.

 It does not include certain functionality which I think of as mandatory: e.g., the ability to do a Boolean search of which groups a person is a member of.

Although in general I think Act is a very useful program, I urge you to test it on your machine with a large contact database and see if it runs fast enough to be useable in your environment.

 eGrabber is an extremely handy program which converts free text (an email signature; a profile on someone’s web page) into an entry in your favorite contact manager.

 This makes it much easier to keep clean records of your sales leads and the other people with whom you need to talk.

 It’s an inexpensive tool and well worth installing.

My one complaint: it does not properly process foreign addresses.

If you provide it with an address in France, even if you explicitly write “Paris, France" at the end of the entry, eGrabber will not properly enter into your contact manager the fact that you are looking at a French address.

Cardscan 7.0 is a significant upgrade to Cardscan 6.0 .

It is a small handheld business card reader plus a software program.

The handheld scanner is not notably different than the preceding version, but the software program is a major step forward.

With the prior edition, my assistant or I had to make manual changes in about 80% of the entries that came from this program.

Cardscan would make errors by running letters together, not understanding that an email address was an email address, and so on.

With the new version, we only have to edit about 5% of the entries that come in.

My only complaint: with a two line address (e.g., "#3 West 35th St., 7th Floor") Cardscan imports that data as one line with a line break.

However, Act! works better if that data were converted into two different lines in the Address1 and Address2 fields respectively.

 I could not find a way to configure Cardscan to handle this common situation more smoothly.

Anyone who frequently meets new people would benefit by purchasing these useful tools.

Personal Productivity | Social Software