The Daily Networker

From the outset of this adventure, I had expected to have to keep my chin up. Quite how literally this would turn out, I had not forseen. For amongst the numerous attractions in the YouNoodle offices (including a piano, a large crash mat and a ping pong table) there sits none other than a chin up bar. Or is it a chin-up machine? I’m not sure. In fact, my unfamiliarity with all equipment chin-up-like was about to be underlined once and for all, as business development director Kirill (yet another super-smart Brit out on the West Coast) gestured towards the league table on the white board.

In a parallel universe, I was about to be asked to see how quickly I could cook an omelette. In another, I was putting on a crash helmet, ready to see if I could drive faster than Jools Holland round a racetrack. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, I was rolling my sleeves up, and assuming the gym-like position. After a drink, I might add. For, sympathetic reader, this endeavour followed, rather than preceded the speednetworking of earlier. Crucially, it followed the celebratory bar visit. Which might well qualify this escapade (billed as a return to the office to ‘pick up my bags’), as entrapment.

By now, Make Your Mark’s Scott Cain will be itching to know whether my name slid above his on that fateful leader-board, beating his frankly impressive tally of nine. Well Scott, as if the thought of me sitting on a plane for the majority of three weeks was not enough to have you smiling into your cornflakes, here’s another bonus; Eight. But that was after a small tipple. And, more importantly, after a speednetwork which, as we all know, can be frankly exhausting. And I’m not bitter about it. Chin up, as they say.

Inspiration comes unexpectedly.  As Archimedes found, as he reclined in his Radox bath, before leaping out and dancing around the room with his rubber duck.  It was therefore a little surprising to find entrepreneurial enlightenment at 30,000ft, onboard an American Airlines flight to San Francisco.  Picking up the Skymall magazine, which showcases the latest and greatest gadgets on the market, I expected that the innovation contained within would peak at a pair of strap-on spikey sandals to aerate the garden.   They were there all right.  But so much more lay in wait!  Reader, it was a veritable Dragon’s delight.  Here is just a selection of the most eye-catching gems;

1. The Floating Wireless Speaker (hours of pool-time entertainment, Archimedes would have loved this)
2. The Dough-nu-matic  Mini-Doughnut Making Machine (Archimedes good friend Homer Simpson’s favourite)
3. The Digital Camera Swim Mask
4. The Discreet Hat Massager (an Indian head massage hidden under a baseball cap)
5. The Pet Ramp and Staircase
6. The Blinking-Eye Glasses (help you to look awake in meeting)
7. The ‘keep your distance’ Bug Vacuum (sucks up insects from over 2ft away)
8. The Marshmallow Shooter (fires marshmallows across the room – how useful)
9. The Pet’s Observation Porthole (now your dog can see through walls)
10. The Portable Swimwear Rotating Dryer
11. The Remote Grill Alert, which tells you when your food is ready, from up to 300ft away
12. The Rotating Washing Line with built in Umbrella, for those unexpected showers

OK I admit.  I may have made one or two of those up.  OK three.  But which three?  A special prize (OK a Souvenir Speednetworking Whistle) awaits the first person to correctly identify the three bluffs!

Three Questions to an entrepreneurial Toronto resident; Comedian, dancer, writer and columnist, Sabrina Jalees;

Q: What’s one amazing thing about Toronto?

A: There are so many different people here, and so many different festivals, cultures and places to go…so it’s really hard to be racist here, because eventually you’re going to be sitting beside the person that you hate, on a long streetcar ride, that’s probably going to be delayed.

Q:  What’s one amazing thing about your job?

A: I enjoy my job because it’s always different.  I started doing stand up comedy when I was sixteen and now I write a column for the Toronto Star and I host a show on CBC Radio…I travel around the country and sometimes the world, telling jokes.

Q: If you had to work for yourself or start your own company, what would it be?

A: Well I do run my own company, but if I had to say goodbye to the industry that I’m involved with…Sabrina’s Pizzeria! And there’s also a mechanical bull in the middle of the pizzeria, and it’s also a club, so you make the money on the liquor sales.  And also, I book stand up comics, so now I’m on the other end, and so all those folks that didn’t let me play their room…guess what?  “You aint playing Sabrina’s Pizzeria!”

(see the video here)

A cracking send-off in London at Stanford’s map and book shop means that the starting whistle has been blown for Speednetwork the Globe!

Global Entrepreneurship Week is on its way!  From the 17th-23rd November this year, people and organisations across over 70 countries will take part in this inaugural event, encouraging young people all over the world to connect with each other, to have ideas, and make them happen.

One of the signature activities of the week, (founded by the Kauffman Foundation and Make Your Mark and with global sponsors including IBM, Ernst and Young and NYSE Euronext) is going to be Speednetworking, because it’s an incredibly simple way to get people sharing ideas and connecting with each other, fast!  With just 2 months to go, it’s time to start encouraging people to either attend or host an event in a city near you. 

The only challenge I have found in over 5 years of hosting Speednetworking events is that the experience tends to be a LOT more enjoyable than it first sounds.  Recent feedback has included;

“It’s like going to a party where you don’t know anyone, and discovering you’re the most sought after guest - suprisingly refreshing”

“Speednetworking is the most fruitful business tool I have ever come across. I met someone who introduced me to a significant investor in one of my productions; as well as meeting the most wonderful cross section of people I would never normally have the pleasure of bumping into in everyday working life.”

“As an owner of a fast growing and dynamic business, I find SpeedNetworking incredibly useful for a few reasons 1) you can meet a lot of new people over a short period of time 2) it doesn’t allow you to be nervous 3) it’s short, so if it isn’t a fit, you don’t get stuck with them 4) you meet people you might not naturally connect with or meet and finally, 5) it fits in well with a busy agenda/timetable”

So instead of sitting here in London telling people about how useful and fun Speednetworking can be, I’m packing my suitcase and heading of on a Whistlestop Tour!  In the style of a SpeedNetworking event, where you meet lots of people in quite a short period of time, I’ll be travelling to TWELVE different countries in just TWENTY TWO days.

Wish me luck as I try to connect with people across the globe.  Here’s my schedule, and the dates show the actual day of the event;

1. Monday 15th September - London, UK
2. Tuesday 16th September - Toronto, Canada
3. Thursday 18th September - San Francisco, USA
4. Monday 22nd September  - Mexico City, Mexico
5. Thursday 25th September - Santiago, Chile
6. Monday 29th September - Sydney, Australia
7. Tuesday 30th September - Singapore City, Singapore
8. Wednesday 1st October - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
9. Friday 3rd October – Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
10. Monday 6th October - Gaborone, Botswana
11. Tuesday 7th October - Johannesburg, South Africa
12. Wednesday 8th October - Dublin, Ireland
13. Thursday 9th October – London, UK

Reader, do you know people in these cities who might be interested in getting involved or in finding out more about Global Entrepreneurship Week?  If so, drop me a line, follow my Whistlestop Tour on the main site or on Twitter, or leave comment after this post.

In the meantime, keep in touch, and I look forward to connecting with you again soon!

I may have discovered (and certainly not mastered!) two recipes for hyper-productivity.  The trouble, they don’t exactly go hand in hand;

Method One;

1) Make yourself a cup of tea. 

2) Close down every web browser window and open your email client

3) Physically disconnect your computer from the internet completely

4) Turn your mobile phone off

5) Open up a blank word (or notepad) document and have a proper notepad next to you.

5) Work at full speed for two 45 minute bursts, with a 15 minute (complete) break in the middle

Method Two;

1) Make yourself a cup of coffee

2) Open up Facebook, Twitter, Google, Addictomatic and BBC News

3) Make sure your computer is reconnected to the internet

4) Turn your mobile phone on

5) Spend 15 minutes unleashing a flurry of emails to people who you really want to make stuff happen with

6) Allow yourself to get massively distracted by the first people who come back to, surfing the top of your inbox with delight.

7) Allow yourself to scurry off down hyperlink rabbit holes not knowing where they might end.

7) Make long shot random calls to people and companies you feel you just have to connect with

Continue this process for no more than 2 sessions of 45 minutes.  Allow yourself a break from your working area during this time, however don’t slow down during that break.

I think that if you are able to crack one of each of these hyper-zones per day (total 3 hours), you’re on to something amazing.  The rest of the time, you’ll be blending techniques, meeting people, working ‘normally’ etc.

What do you reckon?  Do either of these resonate with you?  Have you got other techniques?

Once in a while, I’m quizzed about whether I’d consider going into politics.  Well, there’s something I should share with you;

h/t Stewart Townsend at Sun

In 1971, the Hillside Seekers wanted to teach the world to sing.  Nine years, and several million bottles of Coca Cola later, the Korgis were forced to agree, perhaps reluctantly, that everybody’s got to learn sometime.  Realising this, the eighties pop band might well have donned their leg-warmers, trudged down to the nearest secondary school, and thrown a sausage on a fork across a crowded canteen.  Today, they might very well be in the wrong place.  For in an elegant passing of the educational relay baton, Grange Hill’s imminent closure coincides with the launch of the School of Everything.

Paul Miller is no Mrs McClusky, which is just as well, for it will be his headship which steers this cracking venture through its first stages and beyond.  The basic idea is just plain simple; We’ve all got something which we can teach - and we’ve all got something we want to learn.  Why leave teaching to schools, if the web has connected us all?  When Ebay launched in 1995, the idea that strangers would send stuff off to people they had never met was scoffed at.  Today, your next piano teacher could be sitting in the flat next door, right now, fiddling with his Pez Heads. 

You may have come across Horses Mouth, the online e-mentoring site, which has a similarly straightforward core idea, around learning from each other’s life lessons.  The difference with the School of Everything is, firstly, that the teaching happens face-to-face (although it’s possible to tick a box saying you teach online).  The second difference is that it’s a business, as opposed to being structured as a social enterprise or a charity.  You could call it a social business.  This second difference means that it has attracted an inspiring and eclectic range of shareholders and investors, from Channel 4 and the Young Foundation, to US entrepreneur Esther Dyson and BT’s JP Rangaswami.  Both JP and the Young Foundation’s Geoff Mulgan were on excellent form at this evening’s Channel 4 launch.

I first heard about all of this when I met founder Paul just over a year ago, over coffee.  Then, it was little more than a twinkle in his eye.  That he has taken it through launch, and with such a great group of investors, is testament to a winning idea and to his fantastic drive.  The other thing which always strikes me when I cross paths with Team Everything (they recently won a Catalyst Awards) is that they are a small yet already buzzing organisation with a terrific sense of camaraderie.  So no lessons needed on that front.

Why would someone register as a teacher?  Well, School of Everything allows you to select a range of reasons, whether you’re looking for paying students, skills swapping, ways to help, good conversation or all of the above.  It’s possible to browse possible subjects (picking the first from each section would see you learning art, abstract thinking, driving, allotments, baking, chainmaille - it’s a type of jewellery apparently, addiction management - to social networks perhaps?, ICT, english, hatha yoga, clarinet, acting, cycling, biology and chemistry.  Quite a day at school.

A search reveals that the nearest teacher to me is called Laurie Winkless. She teaches Physics, to ages ten and above.  Which is almost perfect for my level of expertise.  Einstein reckoned that education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one learned at school.  He must have been thinking of a different kind of school.  The place we used to go to learn things.      

Plotting a short break away from Networker Island is always a bit of fun.  Surfing the waves of the web world is not without its perils however, and so a small number of sites have proved remarkably helpful at this adventurous time.

For a bit of fun, try popping ‘Madrid’ into Google. 310 million solutions present themselves.  Excellent.  You could start with the Wikipedia page on Spain’s capital city.  Or maybe Spain’s official tourism website would be the right place to begin? Or you could begin somewhere else completely.  For a well structured jumping-in point for web searches, have a look at Mahalo, the human-powered search engine.  Here’s their page on Madrid. All of a sudden, the skies begin to clear…

Next stop, flights and hotels, so forgive me if I’m telling you about three places you use all of the time.  Skyscanner is a handy comparison site for multiple airlines, and LateRooms is a bit of a goldmine for last minute bargains.  For hand-picked, characterful hotels, you could do a lot worse than rummage around on Splendia. 

22 millon people have used TripAdvisor this week, and it’s hard to deny that it’s a great place for checking that the hotel you’re about to book hasn’t been panned by the past thirty reviewers.  As it turns out, the very best advice I received came from much closer to home.  The site which yielded the best advice of all?  Facebook.  One ’status update’ (that small little box which you fill in to say what you’re doing) was enough to fill a couple of notebook pages of top tips.  No sooner was I ‘looking for great places to go and things to do in Madrid’, than helpful suggestions were landing in my inbox.  One list of a dozen amazing recommendations was from a good friend, Gilly, who I’d forgotten had lived in Madrid for 2 years.  Another terrific compiliation came from a recent colleague, Yuri, for whom it is her home city. 

So next time you’re plotting an escape, and as you gaze down your list of 310 million solutions and your tips from 22 million fellow travellers; just imagine;  the answers may be closer than you think.