In the book Regional Advantage, Annalee Saxenian discusses the differences between the rise of Silicon Valley versus Route 128. In the 1970's Route 128 was a big electronics and industrial manufacturing center around Boston. The graduates of MIT, Harvard and a few other local schools went to work in the regions' electronics manufacturing centers when the government was pouring lots of money into electronics research and manufacturing.
Around the same time (the 1970's if you've got a short attention span) there was also a rise in electronics manufacturing in Silicon Valley in California. Actually, back then it wasn't called Silicon Valley yet. It revolved around Stanford University and a little later California at Berkley.
In Regional Advantage, Saxenian talks about the cultural differences in the two areas, which gave rise to different ways to do business in the same industries. In the East Coast, the companies had a heavy institutional investment, preferring to work with large corporations and government projects with a skepticism toward anything 'new'. By contrast, in what was to become Silicon Valley, a lot of the top tech talent were encouraged to start their own shops.
In addition to encouraging people to starting their own businesses in Silicon Valley, Frederick Terman, a Stanford professor, and a graduate of the East Coast's MIT no less, was serious about creating a community of people who knew and interacted with one another. He invited businesses to become a part of Stanford's business park (the first in the nation) and encouraged people in business to attend classes at Stanford, either in lecture or a convenient video-series.
From Terman's efforts, the connections between and among the semi-conductor and electronics manufacturers became close knit. They became so close knit that these folks shared knowledge freely, consulted one another on projects, even competitors, and developed an open culture. This culture also supported top talent in moving from company to company, thereby enabling a lot of the start-up companies to recruit and get a fresh supply of experienced talent. They say that there was so much movement that people thought they worked for Silicon Valley, not any one particular company!
What does this have to do with your networking efforts?
Networking for yourself is one thing. When you network in a culture that isn't geared toward networking (as in the Boston/East Coast manufacturers), then your networking efforts will be minimally effective. To have your networking efforts maximized, you need to create not just a network, but a culture of networking and networkers who share ideas, opportunities and referrals with one another.
You build a community of networking, like Terman did, by encouraging others to become networkers and netweavers. For you and me, this means that you host and co-host small frequent events with people who you wish to have some sort of social or professional relationship with. For someone with a wide network and industry experience, this could be a bi-monthly informal meeting where other people in your industry and area can meet, greet, swap stories and talk shop.
By hosting and co-hosting events, or even simply acting like a host when you are at an event, you will dramatically increase the size of the network(s) that you are a part of. When you host a network, you build a network. When you host and co-host events consistently, you cultivate the culture of networking, where people feel comfortable meeting and interacting with others either within or outside of their industry. You can even have a after-work happy hour enabling the people from different departments or sites in your company to have an informal mixer.
The point is that networking one-to-one takes a lot of time. Hosting events creates a kind of many-to-many networking that encourages a culture of networking outside of normal boundaries. If it worked for Terman in building the foundations for Silicon Valley, it will work for you.
Just make sure you tune up how you introduce people. Also make sure you apply the secret to successful networking: following up.
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