Networking is Not Cronyism

Success in business is hard enough. Considering today's political and economic climate, succeeding in California is just shy of miraculous for small business owners. California entrepreneurs need any edge they can get over aggressive, though sometimes outmoded, competitors and a customer base with diminishing resources.

Old-school modalities like advertising, marketing, and branding are all very important and useful, but still only tools in an ever-growing toolbox that includes expanding technology and contracting traditional wisdom. On the other hand, despite technology and a new world order, the oldest and most reliable business growth and development tool in history has changed not one bit: The Personal Network.

While it's true that the way we network has and continues to evolve by the minute, the foundation remains the same: Relationships built on trust and over time; relationships built between people; relationships built on promises kept; relationships cultivated by integrity.

It is on that last one that I would offer a word of caution. There is a line between networking relationships and cronyism. In a true networking relationship, referrals are passed based on trust and confidence. That is how it should be. If a confidence is broken, so too is the referral relationship. Referrals based on cronyism, however, are the evil twin; the bastardized belief that because you helped me once, I owe you.

Nowhere is that misanthropic guile more prevalent than in politics. And rarely has there been such a callus demonstration than former California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, commutation of a 16-year prison sentence for the son of a "close friend" and political ally after an innocent college student was brutally murdered outside of a fraternity party.

Schwarzenegger recently gave an interview to Newsweek.com, in which he was asked about the commutation and is quoted as follows:

But not even his politically savvy wife could save him from the fallout of his last-minute decision to reduce by nine years the 16-year voluntary-manslaughter sentence of Esteban Nuñez, who pleaded guilty to participating with three friends in the 2008 homicide of 22-year-old San Diego State University student Luis Santos. The dead man’s family, which received no advance warning of the governor’s decision, is suing to have the sentence restored. Young Nuñez happens to be the son of Schwarzenegger’s friend Fabian Nuñez, the former Democratic speaker of the state assembly.

“I understand people’s disappointments. I understand the parents’ anger. I would probably feel the same way,” Schwarzenegger tells me in his first public comment on the commutation, which he granted hours before leaving office, arguing that his friend’s son didn’t inflict the fatal wound. “My office definitely made a mistake in not notifying the parents beforehand … and I’m ultimately responsible.” But, Schwarzenegger adds, “I feel good about the decision … I happen to know the kid really well. I don’t apologize about it … There’s criticism out there. I think it’s just because of our working relationship and all that. It maybe was kind of saying, ‘That’s why he did it.’ Well, hello! I mean, of course you help a friend.”

"Of course you help a friend," he says. NO! That is not how it works. Trading favors and compromising integrity - yours or anyone else's - is not what networking is all about. That is cronyism at an almost abysmal low.

True and valuable networking relationships are built on trust and confidence; and they thrive and exist on integrity and promises kept. Anything less cannot and must not ever be an acceptable alternative.