Quickthink

I just finished watching this video (courtesy of TechCrunch) of Charlie Rose interviewing Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn).  BTW here is a link to Charlie’s web site where you can check out his other interviews. They are thoughtful and worth watching.

I would guess that I am one of many people who signed up for LinkedIn but rarely use it. To be honest, I never use it. Why not? I thought about it while listening to Reid explain why LinkedIn will revolutionize the world. I guess am still waiting to understand how to incorporate it into my routines so that it adds value rather than just wastes time. Reid’s explanation did help. Though to be honest, I don’t buy it 100%. 

Why not? I don’t buy the problem solving aspect. Reid pitches LinkedIn as a problem solving tool. I see it more like a business phone book on steroids. The difference is that the phone book has no strong learning curve tendencies.  So even I had 1,000,000 people in my network (errr… and I do not) — the network only learns through cycles of shared goals, activity, reflection, re-formulated goals.

Let’s use Reid as an example. He has a lot of money, and he lets people know that he is ready to angel invest in tech start ups. There is a ready made shared goal — doing start ups together. People thus have a reason to connect with Reid to access his money and skills. So Reid can say that he only will link up with people who are recommended by LinkedIn contacts. Nice. Notice also how the “link” is linked to an activity — getting a business going (something Reid is good at). Once the start up is underway, there is a need to reflect whether it worked, and then move on to a next project (more start ups). It is easy to see how LinkedIn would work for Reid.

Great — but how many of us can build this type of global activity loop around us? Most of us have little or no money, mostly local ideas and friends, and only specialized skills that require local context to apply (like being a lawyer).

So LinkedIn works for Reid, and down the road, it might provide a low cost alternative to head hunting, but I would guess that it won’t do that much for the rest of us … until we are more like Reid.

FOLLOW - The bottom line is that there is a cost to try to learn how to be more like Reid. Is it worth it? If you want to think further about the idea of costs —- in this piece, Judith Warner gives a funny example of the costs of just being “mindful”. Going further, Andre Gide wrote a wonderful satire of the various costs associated with exaggerated belief and disbelief in  “The Vatican Cellars” — a book I highly recommend.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 10:58 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.