Monthly Archives: December 2013

Working on Networking!

Isn’t network a technical term for wi-fi or world wide web!
How do humans network?
These were the questions that would pop up in my head every time someone advised me to network.
Over time, I realised networking just became a strange scary word because of the association we make of networking to a necessary outcome specially in a job opportuity. It was clearly not the only thing. Networking is basically a way of connecting to people, keeping abreast of the trends in the market from sources that are a living part of that market. Exploring the field when you are still in a dilemma of a career path and expressing your strong interest when you are sure about your career path.

My experiences with networking taught me a few things that I thought were worthy of sharing. So here we go!

NETWORKING FUNDAMENTALS

  1. Don’t be a predator looking for a prey
    Be a farmer cultivating the crop.
    It’s easy to get misguided to networking as a thing you need to only when you are on the lookout for jobs when the fact is that when you are looking for employment, the desperation comes through in the most unexpected ways negating all the tenets of networking. So make networking second nature instead of the go-to thing during unemployment distress
  2. Be yourself
    Be authentic, you don’t need to mimic someone to get noticed. Find your strengths and project them in your unique way so that the conversation can be fresh and not stale.
  3. Be prepared.
    Nothing breaks a situation like lack of preparation. Preparation is directly proportional to the interest you have in the case. So support your interest in meeting the person by doing thorough research, understand what you’d like to learn, prepare a list of organic questions and then meet. You can make specific asks – that only goes on to reflect your research more.
  4. Be an active listener and be engaged in the conversation.
    Don’t keep your mind occupied thinking about the next question to be asked instead of concentrating on the content of the talk.

Most importantly, It takes time!
Remember it takes time so have multiple touch points to nurture the relationship with the person you wish to connect with.

Take the first step.
Push yourself to take the first step and the rest become easier.

Genuine Interest/ Passion about something + Willingness to act + Skills/ Knowledge/ Ability + Ability to Connect with the Right People = Unstoppable force! (a.k.a Opportunity!)

Practise. Start small by trying to network with people with whom you are allowed to make mistakes in the process of learning – like your peers, seniors, college admin department. Slowly transition to the world of business professionals with a confident you!

 

Failure lures us to success!

Imagine living 19 years of your life in a 10*10 sq.ft room with 20 other children eating, playing, sleeping, reading in the same space. Such was our NGO’s target audience. Guided by an objective of providing holistic development to children-at-risk, our flagship project was to improve their communication skills. For that, we recruited volunteers, trained them and placed them in orphanages. The volunteers taught the children every Saturday and Sunday but we noticed that the gap 5 weekdays in between when there were no classes were doing a lot of harm to our project.

To mitigate this,
Idea: we decided that we could get children access to libraries
Challenge: Children are not allowed to go outside their shelter homes for security reasons
Next idea: Build libraries inside the shelter homes
Challenge(s): Space constraints, fund constraints, resource constraints.
Next idea: Let’s resolve them!

Conditions for resolving the issues:

1. No money
2. Plenty of human resources
3. Strike a balance between the requirements and offerings of the orphanage authorities and our objectives.

SPACE CONSTRAINTS:
Extremely limited space –
came up with a competition open to students in architecture colleges on how to best utilise the space and convert it into a library

Received excellent idea submissions and went on to implement them which made the best use of limited space.

FUND CONSTRAINTS:
Rallied support from parents of the volunteers and peers at work place for initial investments to procure books and stationery.
Researched further and found two organisations that looked promising fit with our model.

Bookwallah: Is a US-based organisation which conducts book donation drives and ships them to the developing countries on a need-basis.

Hippocampus: is an India-based organisation specially working in the field of building library operational models. From levelling the books to categorising the children’s reading levels to track book borrowing to training librarians on the most effective ways to encourage reading habits.

Making these two organisations our participants was the best action plan as it provided our children excellent quality books and well trained and passionate library volunteers to guide them through their exploration of the treasures that the books held.

A lot of details needed to be ironed out all through the process and quite a few tweaks and adjustments made their way into the original proposal. We understood the challenges of working with external collaborators at the same time came to appreciate the strengths they come with.

This model became so successful that we scaled it to 8 libraries running in 5 cities in India catering to 600 children in orphanages.

Look at our latest library we opened on Nov 14th, celebrated as children’s day in India