Where is your community?

A couple of weeks back I talked about diversity and how it builds strength. The juxtaposition of this is feeling part of something and finding people who are similar to you or have the same interests as you.

I then saw an Android advert on TV, that finished with the tagline:

“Be together, not the same”.

This statement identified exactly the sentiment I was looking for when I try to answer why we all need that common thread. It seems the irony of human nature to feel part of something whilst wanting to set ourselves apart.

Seth Godin describes this very well in many of his books and blogs. Finding your ‘tribe’. He talks (writes) a lot about stepping away from the people who don’t ‘get’ what you are doing, who don’t find what you are ‘valuable’. He suggests focussing on what you do best and then finding the group of like-minded people who will be constructive about what you are doing because they understand and have interest in the outcome. These are the people you should be satisfying. You know that what you are doing impacts them.

If you spend all your effort trying to appease those who aren’t your target, fixing ‘problems’ for people who don’t see benefit from the solution, you are, potentially not going to be successful in your endeavours.

He talks more about finding your inner ‘artist’ and always doing your best work, this in turn will make you indispensable.  I have to say that every day should be a chance for you to do your best work for those that matter. I live by the standard: be the best you, you can be. I admit, some days that can be a struggle, but as an aspiration, it is a strong contender for a great life lesson

You can’t be all things to all people, once you focus on what you stand for, what you are about, who you are, what your unique value is, you can start to find your tribe.

If you are looking, you may find a suitable tribe at Tech Talkfest, we value generosity, trust and fun. If you meet our members, you will truly have fantastic fun with a room full of successful people who want to help you, ‘Be together, not the same!’ (thanks Android!)

Ghilaine

@LadyGhilaine

Watch and Learn

Last week , I caught up with Nitin Dahad, another Tech London Advocate, who is an amazing gentleman and we got talking about education and passing on knowledge. He is one that loves to share what he knows where he can and you may well see him at some of the events he is asked to be an expert on as well as 2 of his great publications – http://thenextsiliconvalley.com/ and http://www.indiaincorporated.com/opinions/itemlist/category/23-tech-speak.html

Nitin Dahad

He told me how much he loves to write and so uses this outlet to pass on his extensive knowledge gained over a few years of exciting experiences growing companies. When he talks about these his face comes to life. He has helped grow companies and has built many great relationships on the way.

Along with so many other people I have had the pleasure of meeting over the last few months, he is in a position to put his skills and experience to good use with meaningful projects.

I am not sure if there is something in the water, or in the air, but I am meeting so many people who are taking stock of their lives and seeing what they can achieve for the good of groups of people rather than corporations or themselves. There is obviously a lot to be said for the collaboration consumption community that has taken this zeitgeist and amplified it so that larger communities are aware and can get involved.

Nitin is doing his part by mentoring younger entrepreneurs, helping them become the successful companies of their generation. He is often asked to be on panels or speak at events. Keep an eye on his Twitter feed, @ndahad  and no doubt you will find a great place to ‘bump’ into him.

Lets do something about the skills shortage!

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting another TLA, Jo Rabin, a leader who has a track record of innovative use of technology. We chatted about the Learning curve event, and one of the subjects close to his heart is the skills shortage.

In the early days of mobile technology, he recognised that he needed to bring people together in the mobile space, so he created a group called Mobile Mondays. This has been extremely successful and has grown from strength to strength. One of the many outcomes of Mobile Mondays was the realisation that even after over 10 years, the training for this new mobile/digital was not up to scratch.

From a collaboration with UCL, they went about building something that would fill this skills gap by creating a new style of pro­gramme intended spe­cific­ally to address the chal­lenges of teaching a very rapidly chan­ging subject. This became the mobile academy. A learning envir­on­ment designed to get an overall grounding in busi­ness, design and how to work with tech­no­logy. Par­ticipants are encour­aged to work on a project as they pro­gress through the pro­gramme of talks, work­shops, demon­stra­tions and clinics delivered by industry pro­fes­sionals who have been there and done it.

Not content on just one chance to build skills for the future, from mobile academy came a similar opportunity for those that want a grounding with games. The Games Quarter came into being. The education pro­gramme covers the things you need to know to create suc­cessful games studios and publish great games. It is aimed at start-ups and indies as well as exper­i­enced games folk from larger studios who want a deeper under­standing of the rela­tion­ship between dif­ferent design, engin­eering, mar­keting and busi­ness skills. The Games Quarter gives a broad over­view of games to help fill in busi­ness and tech­nical know­ledge gaps.

Such is the need for these types of training programmes he hopes to extend the programmes to other industry verticals. Anyone who wants to help with retail or finance, do please get in touch and I will put you in touch!

Diversity is our strength

There is a lot of talk about Diversity at the moment: Diversity of Boards; Diversity in teams; Diversity of users; Diversity of friends. Depending on what websites, newspapers, blogs or people you read or follow, you may well come up against the noise. It shows it is a big issue and it shows that we have not solved it. In new terms it is about inclusion, everyone is diverse one way or another. Just because you share a ‘label’ with another person, doesn’t mean you have the same view. “I am female, I must think the same way as all women.” “I am from British, I must feel the same way as all Britons.” You get the picture?

There is contradiction with diversity, sometimes you need a common theme to bring people together.

I was having dinner with friends and was talking about what is happening in each others’ lives and I was talking about Tech Talkfest. One of my friends turned to me and said it must be so lovely being a group built around generosity and trust and not around job title and profession. She clarified this by stating that although people who share the same job title or work  in the same industry can help each other, there can often be a level of competition and less trust. You can’t talk to a competitor about a problem you are having without either keeping something back or, potentially, breaking an NDA you have with your company.

This is what we offer: First and foremost, Trust. You cannot build a relationship, however small, without it. Second, Generosity. Everyone in our network understands that the key to business and personal growth is giving. It doesn’t always have to be a lot. Often what is a massive gift to someone is an off the cuff remark. I am always astounded by how grateful people can be over something that I see as a quick and simple act. I know, when I say Thank you to someone, they often feel the same way too.

We also offer Diversity. We don’t have a set agenda, we are not a list of job titles, we are not a list of professions or industries. We are people who like to meet other people and see where we can help. If you have the benefit of knowing one of our members you will, no doubt, fully understand why they are one of us. If you are lucky, they will generously invite you to one of our member events!

You will have the benefit of walking into a room full of successful people and all they will want to do is help.

How was it for you?

Following on from my post on Friday, it was lucky for me that I didn’t dress up as it appeared I was not the only one. Apart from a dog dressed as a spider and a baby dressed as a skeleton, everyone was scarily dressed in the fancy dress costume of business casual. Saying that though, someone did temporarily don a lovely pink onesie.

Happy Halloween from our itsy bitsy #Dogpreneur or is it a spider? Thanks #anitaroddick for the halloween-spiration http://t.co/eruJPQUVAw—
Microsoft Ventures (@MSFTVenturesUK) October 31, 2014

Before the networking began, I was fortunate to sit in on one of the other advisors giving a short deep dive into the dark depths of social media. Jonathan works for Engine so has extensive experience in this area. He fully understands that the cohort of start-ups has limited budgets for full scale media and PR, so he gave a nice view of what people can do themselves to increase their visibility. What was a relief was to find out that there is no science to ‘going viral’ so that, at least, levels the playing field!

After that, the happy hour Halloween drinks, kindly provided by MS ventures, allowed us to let our hair down and get chatting with the other advisors/mentors or start-ups.

At these events I think that it is important not to speak to lots of people, but as I say time and again, to have a 1 or possibly 2 great conversations. That to me is a success. Friday night did not disappoint! I was fortunate to chat with a lady who is in her final year of her degree and has recently decided that she wants to gain some marketing experience. She has had a few short internships and is helping out where she can to expand her knowledge and determine her next steps. It is always lovely to speak to people who are enthusiastic about their passions and are taking each step with conviction to get to their goal. Nothing worth doing is easy, but having a plan helps. If anyone can help her out with some Marketing experience, please do let me know in the comments section.

As a double success, I managed to get talking to someone who works at the MSN division at Microsoft. Who knew that it was still alive and kicking!? It was lovely to talk with him about his career history as well as trade stories about working for one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It looks like that we can help each other out on a few things, so as well as a great conversation – fortuitous connections alive and kicking!

Halloween networking a success, with or without a costume!

With a little help from your friends

You may still be sceptical of networking. “Surely”, you will say, “sometimes people are your competitors and that’s the end of it?” I truly believe that if you can learn to start to look at the world through the lens of win-win, you will find that situation happens much less often that you would think. Even when two people are applying for the same job, they often do so with very different aims – one may want to switch departments and position themselves for a more senior role, while another may be looking for a management challenge and a payrise. If you are lucky you may work for a company where you could suggest a different split of the role to get you both what you want. But even if not, suppose that you get the role? You will always need good people around you, so having thought about what your competitor wants, you may be able to use your new position to find a role for them that benefits you both.

There is very little that you can want from life that you won’t need someone else’s help to achieve. Every modern job relies on a series of intertwined organisations in order to make it possible. Take my previous role as a coder. That role wouldn’t have existed without the sales team to close business, or indeed without the clients to demand it. It also would have been a lot more painful and less fun without payroll software, administrative and support staff and our office chef!

Networking allows you to reach the people who can help you best. It allows you to make contact with individuals who you would otherwise have not had access to. Most of all it allows you to uncover serendipitous opportunities that you could not have planned for, for the simple reason that you were not aware that they existed.

Understanding who you are is central to being a successful networker

While you do not have a very developed network, the easiest way to begin to expand it is by meeting people at events, whether these are purposely designed for networking, or just a place where lots of people are gathered. This can be the most difficult and nerve wracking way of networking, much more pleasant is to network over a coffee or glass of wine with an engaging and influential person.

That is how we recommend you do it at Tech Talkfest. Being able to ask for specific introductions to relevant people, walking into a room full of people, many of whom you already know. They, in turn, will make introductions to some of those you don’t know.  The conversation flows and the trust grows.

Zoe

@ZoeFCunningham

No longer ‘I win, you lose’

I have made the personal journey from shrinking violet to life and soul of the party. But unless you have been through this journey yourself, you might be thinking “Why bother? Yes, I can see how perhaps I too could come to love networking, but I don’t see that I need to.”

My journey to understanding why networking is for everyone, not just salespeople, started with a fundamental shift in how I viewed the world. For everyone, our training for the real world starts in a schooling system, almost all of which operate in a way that is, it turns out, not at all like the real world. If you help your friend to study and get an A grade, it doesn’t help your marks. Worse, most grading systems are relative, so by helping your friend to get an A you are actually reducing your chances to get one.

Lots of people operate with a win-lose mind-set. If your colleague wins the promotion, you don’t. If everyone in your organisation becomes more talented, you become less valuable. If a similar company to yours makes a sale, your market share diminishes.

It is natural to think this way. In the formative years of the human race, resources were scarce. Human beings were very often in the situation that if someone else ate, you did not. You had to be prepared to fight to stay alive. There are also situations today that are win-lose. If you are competing against others, for example in a professional sport, only one person can take home the gold medal. However, nowadays the win-lose situations are mostly artificially constructed. School, sports and political elections are systems that we have created to function in this way. Remarkably, once you start to think in the opposite way to win-lose, which is win-win, you will start to see that win-win applies to almost everything in your life.

What if… your colleague winning a promotion means that you now have a useful friend in a more senior position who can help you with your agenda? What if… everyone in your organisation becoming more talented means that collectively you achieve more, win more clients and gain an improved professional reputation? What if… your competitor makes a sale, does a great job and as a result increases the total market available for everyone?

Win-win is the concept that, I can get what I want by helping you to get what you want. Win-win is a common negotiation strategy for ongoing relationships. Rather than beating down a supplier to a price that is uneconomical you instead want to negotiate a deal that works for you and for them, so that they want to continue working with you longer term.

When you deal with other people with a win-win rather than a win-lose attitude you are much more likely to get to a solution.

If you are working together you can trust each other and pool information and contacts, making you both at least twice as likely to make progress towards your goals.

In reality it will often be more than twice as likely as information does not combine in a linear fashion – for example two pieces of information put together may uncover a third.

Zoe

@zoefcunningham

Virtuous Circle of Generosity!

Hi! Have you met Vijay?

He was responsible for ensuring the infrastructure was fully functioning for one of the major global investment banks. A vital role for any large organisation, but not one that is often front and centre of a business. It is so fundamental to the business, that you only hear of someone like Vijay when something goes wrong. As well as the smooth running, he had the added responsibility of some of the highest security requirements to manage.

Now he has stepped into the limelight by taking on the role of VP of Operations for EMEA at Digital Realty, the world’s leading provider of data centre and colocation solutions. He now extends his extensive expertise by helping many more companies understand their unique needs and providing client-driven, secure, reliable and cost effective data center and colocation solutions. He should know, working for a bank, these are the must have requirements, not the nice to have optional extras.

Vijay Mistry – VP of Operations, EMEA at Digital Realty

Vijay is quite a private person, he loves meeting amazing, interesting people, but you won’t find him holding court at countless networking events. He has a great network of people he knows and trusts, having cultivated relationships with a distinct group of people over his career. He truly understands the real meaning of networking and how helping people is the basis of that. Because of that, he has a large number of people who support him and help *him*. Chances are, he knows someone you know, and if you get the chance, I would ask for an introduction through one of your mutual contacts.

I don’t think he will mind me saying, having spoken to him recently, he really saw the huge benefit that meeting new people recommended by his already extensive network provides. He didn’t waste lots of time trying to meet the right people at a myriad of events, he spoke to the people he trusted and explained how he could help as well as the challenges he faced. They in turn introduced him to the right people he could help and who could help him. In,  what seems as, no time he had helped the right people and he had a solution to his challenge!

If you are lucky enough to meet him, you will be regaled with great anecdotes and funny stories. If you know him, you know how great his offer of help is and graciously, he will accept your help. The virtuous circle of generosity!

Help!

Helping others comes in many different forms. People think they need to spend their money, or a lot of their very precious time. This is not always the case, something that comes easily to one person could take hours, weeks, months for someone else to master. A flippant comment from the right person can release a solution to someone who has been agonising over a problem.

Someone may have a great solution to a problem that is costing you time, energy and pain. If they try and ‘sell’ you the solution you seek, is this help? Of course it is, you value what they provide, they need to pay the bills and eat. Many people don’t like heavy handed sales tactics, and rightly so, in my opinion, but equally, should you get help for free?

What have you done that would benefit you so greatly as to receive free help from everyone you know? I believe that many fortunate people do receive just that. But their definition of free is often different to those that think it is just without money being exchanged. They receive time, expertise even gifts, because they freely give up their time, expertise, skills.

Is the barter system alive and well? A lot of people think help is and should be a truly altruistic endeavour.

Do you treat  ‘mates rates’ as cheaper than your average? Is that how you value your friends, trying to get things at cut price, or paying the full value, but knowing you get a result that you can trust.

Within Techtalkfest, we believe in the latter. With this great exchange of skills, time and expertise, we are helping everyone grow: Grow as people; grow their skills, grow their contacts; grow their business

This is the joy of a group of people with diverse skills and experiences, there is a reason they make the strongest and most successful teams. Someone who looks with fresh eyes on a problem; someone with strengths in your area of weakness; someone who has solved a similar challenge can all help with a creative solution.

Having a general conversation in relaxed, fun surroundings is the ideal situation to bat about thoughts that are on your mind, with people who want to help. You should try it! We try to regularly do just that!

Seeking Luxury and Pleasure?

You walk down the street and see these amazing buildings that stand out while just ‘fitting in’, you walk into a shop and wonder why it is a pleasure to peruse, because you manage to walk around and see everything so clearly. These things seem so natural that you can’t imagine that someone worked extremely hard at getting the right mix for your seamless experience.

Torquil McIntosh, Sybarite Architects

One of the people who works so hard to generate this simplicity is Torquil McIntosh at Sybarite. If you have had the pleasure of meeting Torquil you know he brings a sense of fun and mischief to the party! He manages to ask the questions people are afraid of asking.

This is especially useful in his line of work and it shines through as Leslie Chiu at Ward Ferry Management describes, “Sybarite’s designs are witty, innovative and ground-breaking, yet are balanced by a careful attention to detail and purpose which is what makes them truly new classics.”

They named their practice after the natives of Sybaris who were stereotyped as seekers of pleasure and luxury, this philosophy seems to run through their work.

Not satisfied with designing buildings for the short term, Sybarite are looking to the future of housing in interesting and creative ways. They have designed a tree house that can take 5 bedrooms at 300sq feet:  “the future of country living”

By all accounts, Torquil is not your typical architect. He manages to combine humanity, nature and technology to create a positive space that is not in conflict. I am not an expert here, but he incorporates the artist as well as the architect, no doubt due to the discipline that he refined studying at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. I am sure that many living artists cannot boast of being featured at the V&A, but an architect? They featured in the V&A as part of AJ Corus 40 Under 40 exhibition.

You may think someone this accomplished would be aloof, not Torquil, he has a real interest in people and loves to talk about interesting subjects, it’s why we love him here at Tech Talkfest!

You may be lucky to meet him, or you can follow @SybariteArch on twitter to find out where the next piece of art will be appearing.

You can see his work around the world, here in London you can see it by walking into a Marni store, amongst others. Treat it as part of your gallery tour of London!