The first thing I needed to do was enlist the support of an institution or expert in TQM in order to attract other potential members. I asked the head of TQM for First Chicago, Aleta Belltetete, to join me as cofounder. She then pulled in her boss and one of the most influential CEOs in Chicago at the time, Dick Thomas, who gave us his blessing and agreed to adopt the initiative as one he personally supported. With Dick's backing, Governor Jim Edgar gladly assigned his Lieutenant Governor to our board. In landing the support of these three people, our start-up organization got a big dose of credibility. Soon a whole host of people was willing to be part of the enterprise, including the leaders of TQM at Amoco and Rush Presbyterian Hospital, who also brought their CEOs on board. The kicker: Because I had started the organization, I was president! Of course, now we had to create, run, and finance this enterprise. But the hard part was now done. We were a credible institution, and from here we all just rolled up our sleeves and got to the nitty-gritty work, which is also critical.
Thus was born The Lincoln Award for Business Excellence (ABE). The organization still exists today as a successful not-forprofit foundation that assists Illinois organizations in building sound businesses. It has hundreds and hundreds of volunteers, a large board, and a full-time staff. Two years after I started it, I knew every major CEO in Chicago on a first-name basis.
The lesson? Even a Harvard MBA or an invitation to Davos is no substitute for personal initiative. If you can't find an outfit to join that allows you to make a difference, then recognize what you do have to offer—your particular expertise, contacts, interests, or experience. Rally people behind them and make your own difference.
The days when clubs were only for wealthy white men to consort with people just like themselves are over. It doesn't matter if it's a group of carpet salespeople meeting weekly to discuss the trials and tribulations of their jobs; a roundtable of female Republicans who are dissatisfied with the stance of the state party; or a group who share a passion for great wines and who come together monthly to do tastings, hear vintners who are traveling through the area, and who plan an annual trip to Napa. Whatever it is and whoever you are don't matter.
As long as it's as an association of people with shared interests meeting in a specified place (even if that place is cyberspace), you'll benefit from belonging to something larger than yourself. You and your fellow members will be strengthened by a collective identity. And whereas with business, where boundaries of most relationships are clearly defined by a specific project or deal and end when that project or deal is done, membership in a club (preferably a club you've started) will lead to friendships that will last for years.
The business term networking, as it happens, joined the English language in 1 9 6 6 . But more than two centuries earlier, in Philadelphia, a young Benjamin Franklin used this sweet social science to become one of the most influential men in our as-yet-untitled nation. Before he became a revered patriot, statesman, and inventor, he was one of America's most successful businessmen, rising from indentured servant to printing tycoon.
Flip your calendars, if you w i l l , back to 1 7 2 3 , at which time the seventeen-year-old Franklin was neither wealthy nor accomplished. He was an aspiring entrepreneur—trained in the printing trade by his brother James—and a fresh face in Philadelphia, having moved there after failing to find work in N e w York. Knowing no one in his new town, but eager to start his own print shop, Franklin began to flex his connecting mojo.
Within seven months, Franklin—who'd landed a job in an established print shop—made the acquaintance of Pennsylvania Governor William Keith. The governor encouraged young Franklin to travel to London to buy whatever equipment he'd need to start his own press. Keith even promised letters of reference and credit, both of which Franklin would need to purchase a printing press and type.
But upon reaching London, Franklin found that Keith had not furnished these letters. Franklin spent the next two years earning enough money to simply sail back to America. On his return voyage, Franklin again displayed his networking virtuosity: His first job, back in Philadelphia, was as a clerk in the store of Thomas Denham, a fellow passenger on his trans-Atlantic voyage.
Before long, Franklin was back in the print trade, employed in the same established print shop as before. In the interest of intellectual stimulation and his own self-advancement, Franklin organized a dozen of his friends into a Friday night social group called the "Junto"—described, as follows, in The Autobiography.
The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy [physics], to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.
The members of the Junto were young men not yet respectable or established enough to break into the clubs that served Philadelphia's business elite. Like Franklin, they were tradesmen, common people. No doubt about it—the man loved clubs. Indeed, in addition to its lessons of thrift, industry, and prudence, Franklin's autobiography tells us every man should be part of a social group, if not three. He believed that a group of like-minded, achievementoriented individuals could dramatically leverage each other's success to do things otherwise impossible.
N o w flash those calendars f o r w a r d , if you can, to 1 7 3 1 . Franklin, having earned enough to start his own print shop, invested in a small failing newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Through snappy content and graphics (much of it written or drawn by Franklin himself) and daring distribution, Franklin turned the Gazette into a profitable vehicle with the largest circulation in the colonies. The newspaper's prosperity transformed Franklin into an eighteenth-centurymediamagnate.Franklingainedenough renown—and money—to apply himself to public projects, the first of which was the establishment of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the first circulating library in North America (still in existence).
It was the library campaign—the first of Franklin's several public projects for Philadelphia—that gave Franklin a deep insight into one of the crown virtues of networking. The resistance he encountered, he tells us:
[M]ade me soon feel the Impropriety of presenting one's self as the Proposer of any useful Project that might be suppos'd to raise one's Reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's Neighbors, when one has need of their Assistance to accomplish that Project. I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, w h o had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of Reading. In this w a y my Affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis'd it on such Occasions.
A n d , oh, would there be "Occasions." Following the library in 1731—for which the Junto helped Franklin find his first fifty subscribers—there came Philadelphia's city watch (1735); its first fire company ( 1 7 3 6 ) ; its first college, which would two years later become the University of Pennsylvania ( 1 7 4 9 ) ; its first—and also the colonies' first hospital, through a mixture of public and private funding ( 1 7 5 1 ) ; and its first fire insurance company (1751). Franklin also organized Pennsylvania's first volunteer militia (1 747) and introduced a program of paving, lighting, and cleaning Philadelphia's streets (1756). Each project depended upon the assistance of Franklin's network of personal and professional connections, and with each project his network grew, along with his reputation as a doer of g o o d .