Super Networking

One of the great thing about an MBA is that you get to meet a lot of very interesting characters during the course. Most B-Schools claim that they love “diversity”, which can be translated as “We love Characters!”. Incidentally, this is also the slogan of the (American) TV channel “USA”, which explains why going through an MBA program is as mind-numbing as watching soaps on TV, but I digress.

I met Doctor Domnath (name changed to protect anonymity) 1 week into the course. As he was a real doctor (you know, the MBBS-MD kind, as opposed to the fake PhD kind), I had assumed that he’ll be those nose-in-the-book bookworm types who spends most of their time mugging books that are so thick that they can viably be used as attack weapons against terrorists. While this was largely true of Doctor Domnath, he also had a very unconventional trait that was very interesting: He was one of those “Super Networkers”.

What is a “Super-Networker”, you ask?

Simply defined, a super-networker is someone who wants to “network” with everybody. They feel like they have to get to know every single person that they come across. Most of them do this out of sheer curiosity, others in the hope that sometime in the uncertain future their “network” and “friend-of-a-friend” will help them out when they are in need of something. To a true super-networker, however, getting to know people is something that comes naturally, somewhat like snoring. They feel an irresistible urge to get to know anything that moves and many things that don’t, and they do it effortlessly, simply and delightedly.

Doctor Domnath was one of those true super-networkers. Let me explain with an illustration.

Doctor Domnath and I were walking towards our dining hall one evening, speculating about why it is socially unacceptable to send a life-sized carboard cut-out of yourself to a wedding that you don’t want to attend. At the dining hall, we are supposed to sign in, so that they can keep track of who’s eating what, and while we were doing that, I recieved a call on my cell. I answered the phone, and maybe spent 2-3 minutes explaining to the lady on the other end why they shouldn’t give me a credit card now that I was a student and had no income.

While I was chatting on the phone, Doctor Domnath had noticed that a lady was talking to the dining hall waiter in Bengali, which also happened to be his native language. That was enough to trigger the super-networking switch inside the doctor. He immediately swung into action.

He walked up to the two, and introduced himself. What followed in the next 2-3 minutes was sheer magic, the kind of thing that takes your breath away. Doctor Domnath managed to network with both the lady and the waiter simultaneously. He found out that the lady was the wife of a professor who taught on campus, and that the professor’s dad’s gardener had been his grandfather’s driver’s 2^nd cousin. He also established a connection with the waiter – His second wife’s uncle had been Doctor Domnath’s neighbor in his previous life.

Not only was Doctor Domnath’s ability to establish networks across languages, time, space, species and rebirths remarkable, he immediately managed to gain the trust of people as well. The Professor’s wife invited him to dinner the next day, and the waiter agreed to supply fresh fish to a restaurant Doctor Domnath was planning to set up 20 years from now.

I later complimented Doctor Domnath on how cool it is that he manages to remember all the people he meets and how well he maintains his networks. I asked him to teach me some of this skill, and he told me something very insightful. He said

“Teaching someone to network is like teaching a pig to sing. It wastes your time, annoys the pig, and in the end what you get is just a pig that wants to mud-wrestle other pigs.”

I didn’t really understand what that meant, but I guess that’s why I’m not a super-networker.