In case you missed it, The Wall Street Journal (3/26) ran an interesting article on how companies are moving beyond sports, steak and scotch to cultivate new clients. No one thought it the least bit silly.As a woman entrepreneur, how do you network? Once you make a connection, do you keep in touch, continue to ask how things are going with the person until such time they might need something you have to offer?
After all, networking over shoe shopping at a Manhattan boutique is no different for women than playing golf and sharing cigars after a steak dinner is for men. For the 53 shoppers who attended a "shoe event" sponsored by law firm Bryan Cave LLP on a recent Tuesday evening -- all of them female lawyers and their female corporate clients or friends -- getting to know one another while browsing designer shoes was a refreshing change from being the lone woman at a client dinner or sports event.
"The shoes were an icebreaker for starting conversations," says Elizabeth DaSilva, managing director, Global Trust Services, Americas at Bank of New York. She mulled a pair of high-heeled evening pumps but quickly turned her attention to the other shoppers. "It was the first opportunity I'd had to talk to lawyers my firm uses about something other than an immediate work assignment," adds Ms. DaSilva. She didn't buy any shoes but found the shopping and dinner after at a Turkish restaurant relaxing, and says she came away feeling more comfortable with attorneys from Bryan Cave and with names of other executives for her contact list.
Such women-only networking events are proliferating at law firms and an array of other companies, including Ernst & Young LLP, Merrill Lynch & Co. and General Electric Co.
Read more here.
Separately and from the book "Women Who Changed The World:"
Chapter 44
Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams
The voice of women has a special role and a special soul force in the struggle for a non-violent world. ~ Betty Williams' Nobel address
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