Part I
Why communicating with strangers is the key to business success
Meeting someone new can be called luck, fate, serendipity — or in some cases plain old bad luck — but either way, you have both found yourselves in the same place, or doing the same activity at the same time, allowing you to connect in some way. Something, somewhere has lined up the variables to make a connection happen, no matter how obvious or subtle.
Read the following chapters to learn how to:
• put yourself in situations where you can meet people
• take action to increase your opportunities for making business connections
• discover ways of finding common ground with strangers to build new relationships
• behave to ensure you engage successfully with people
• mix things up a little to increase your chances of stumbling across someone or something new and exciting.
Chapter 1
Is the internet limiting serendipity?
A stranger is simply someone you have not met yet.
Anon
Before computers there were many opportunities to meet people and have chance conversations that could lead to unexpected pleasant surprises. Long before we had email, we may have met someone we knew on our way to post a letter, or we may have bumped into someone new on our way to use the photocopier at the library. These chance encounters could be useful as well as quite pleasant. Another name for this is serendipity, meaning a ‘happy accident’ or ‘pleasant surprise’ — but for these opportunities to happen, we must first be alert to the ...
