Henry Ng is a name I haven't spoken in a long time. I met Henry in 1986 or thereabouts. He was the first person from another nation that I did business with. He was an exchange MBA from Hong Kong who was up to something at Xerox in the US and we made fast friends. I chauffeured him around LA, showing him various sights and sites.
Like many of the young men in Hong Kong at the time, Henry was new to the city and wore a business suit for the first time in his life. He had many business cards and distributed them as often as possible. In that way we were both alike, the first businessmen in our family history. I asked him what was the great difference between the way business was done in China and what he told me, I will never forget. In his clipped English he explained that in the US, we have a class of people who do business and an extraordinary system of openness and trust - that you don't have to know your banker to know he won't steal your deposits. In China conversely, you don't do business with strangers.
Ng's Rule: If you have friends, you do business. If you have no friends, you have no business.
I'm not sure that Henry realized the way 'you have no business' resonates as an idiom in English, as in you have no business being here. But that was the key to me to remember, and so I have.
It was after the exausting and exasperating experience that was the Bowen-Fisher debate of last year, one of my resolutions was to re-establish and extend my personal networks. It all goes under the headline of 'The Brother's Cup' and the endgame is a supper club and a network of owned buildings in major cities. What it is now is that whenever I travel, I make sure that I touch base with my readers and friends in that city and make sure that I break bread with them at least once. I have hooked up again with old friends from high school and endeavored to make sure my time away from the keyboard begins to augment my networkedness.
This year there are two events that I'm hooking into as well. The first is for the week after next at the Long Beach Grand Prix. I'll be hooking up for the first time to people I've been gaming with online for four years. I know their voices and their playing styles and skills, but few of their real names or faces. This summer I'll be buying a block of tickets for the Return to Forever Tour, for my birthday. The invitation is open.
In addition, I have made a commitment to add Facebook, Dopplr and Twitter to my online retinue. This will help me keep track of people and for people to keep track of me. I have interlocking rings of social networking tools, but Facebook will be for those people I want to meet eventually. I have LinkedIn which is active for career purposes and an old Orkut profile just in case I ever get to Brazil, an obligatory MySpace page and several others like Multiply, Plaxo, Flickr and my growing YouTube presence too. It's very difficult to express oneself online, and so I am going to be using my online to drive people to me face to face.
Hookup with me, I'll hookup with you. We'll have shrimp.
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