Make Your Contacts Count: Networking Know How for Cash, Clients, and Career Success

Rating:
Summary: Required Reading For Those Who Wish to Stay Employed
Review: As a career and life planning coach, I have refered hundreds of clients to the business books written by Baber and Waymon. Make Your Contacts Count is their latest book about building business relationships through strategic networking. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to stay employed and/or maximize his/her professional contributions.

The authors make the important point that building professional relationships can not be left to chance because the quality of our business relationships directly relates to employability, career advancement and overall professional success. The premise of the book is networking efforts must be ongoing and planned, but for many the thought of having to talk with strangers, pitch a product or service, or even answer the envitable "What do you do?" is difficult. This book anticipates people's fears and resistance and helps the reader to explore ways to comfortably begin to increase visability and impact inside and outside their organizations.

The layout of Make Your Contacts Count is engaging and interactive. It is easy to skim and bold faced "tips" highlight many pages. This is a "how-to" style reference book that will stand the test of time, buy it as an investment in your future.

Rating:
Summary: This book helped my son get a better job!
Review: I love this book. I had read it myself and when my son lost his job, I gave it to him. He said it really helped him figure out how to use his contacts and do the kind of networking that paid off. Also, I love the way the book is laid out. It's easy to go through and pick out what is particularly relevant to you. Easy reading yet filled with solid information, the kind of help that does pay off. I highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Get in Contact with Your Future
Review: This book's a "keeper." It's so good, I use it for prizes in my classes--in Marketing, in Teaching Adults, in Information Technology, and in Organization Development/Human Resources. As we change with the business environment this century, people--contacts--are our primary resources, support systems, and the source of much of the value with which we transact.

In Marketing, it crowns the experience I call "The Nifty Business Card Contest" (it's fitting). In Teaching Adults, it conveys the basic skills that should be included in a broad variety of today's--and tomorrow's--learning experiences and in "double loop" learning activities that bring the learner to truly capitalize on experience. In Information Technology, it helps readers extend and make useful their human networks--a skill not much taught in IT courses. Finally, in Organization Development, it provides a big dose of strategies, skills, approaches and techniques that are so important in organizations and for people undergoing change.

Waymon and Baber have obviously recollected their experiences well--and translated them into thoroughly useful words of guidance for readers wanting to begin or to vastly improve their networking activities. They provide examples of what to say in stressful or uncomfortable situations, how to handle a received business card and "trigger" a request for your own, and how to organize and follow up occasions where you meet people.

Perhaps the most useful information relates to how to preplan for situations in which you are to meet people--how to select and to craft your agenda and to work for its fulfillment in the people you meet. It is obvious that the greatest talents in communication and perceptivity are at play here--and those of us whose idea of networking is "Hi! I'll call you sometime" will be greatly appreciative both of the depth this book brings to the process and of the practical guidance and checklists it provides.

It is a credit to the craft of writing the authors have mastered that you can read this book from front to back, back to front, or skip around with equal pleasure and a high degree of derived value. Readers who pick this book up will almost certainly be better networkers when they put it down, whether they read a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter or the entire book. This review would be longer, but I have to go meet a few people now.

Rating:
Summary: Get in Contact with Your Future
Review: This book's a "keeper." It's so good, I use it for prizes in my classes--in Marketing, in Teaching Adults, in Information Technology, and in Organization Development/Human Resources. As we change with the business environment this century, people--contacts--are our primary resources, support systems, and the source of much of the value with which we transact.

In Marketing, it crowns the experience I call "The Nifty Business Card Contest" (it's fitting). In Teaching Adults, it conveys the basic skills that should be included in a broad variety of today's--and tomorrow's--learning experiences and in "double loop" learning activities that bring the learner to truly capitalize on experience. In Information Technology, it helps readers extend and make useful their human networks--a skill not much taught in IT courses. Finally, in Organization Development, it provides a big dose of strategies, skills, approaches and techniques that are so important in organizations and for people undergoing change.

Waymon and Baber have obviously recollected their experiences well--and translated them into thoroughly useful words of guidance for readers wanting to begin or to vastly improve their networking activities. They provide examples of what to say in stressful or uncomfortable situations, how to handle a received business card and "trigger" a request for your own, and how to organize and follow up occasions where you meet people.

Perhaps the most useful information relates to how to preplan for situations in which you are to meet people--how to select and to craft your agenda and to work for its fulfillment in the people you meet. It is obvious that the greatest talents in communication and perceptivity are at play here--and those of us whose idea of networking is "Hi! I'll call you sometime" will be greatly appreciative both of the depth this book brings to the process and of the practical guidance and checklists it provides.

It is a credit to the craft of writing the authors have mastered that you can read this book from front to back, back to front, or skip around with equal pleasure and a high degree of derived value. Readers who pick this book up will almost certainly be better networkers when they put it down, whether they read a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter or the entire book. This review would be longer, but I have to go meet a few people now.