How To Build An Awesome MBA Network

Start building your MBA network today! Professional and MBA networking is vital to making the most of business school, but MBA network events and networking in general don’t have to be a drag – did you know you can build a global MBA network and form strong professional connections in a way that doesn’t make you feel like an A-Hole? That’s what this week’s MBA Monday is all about! Angela Guido gives some networking advice and networking tips from her book on networking, and introduces you to Friendmo.

Friendmo is an app we’ve been working on to help you build your network through genuine connection and friendship, and we’re really excited to share it with you!

Friendmo for IOS and Android: https://friendmo.com/

How To Network Without Feeling Like An A-Hole: https://mbas.co/network

#MBAMondays #Friendmo #Professionalnetworking

Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:

A lot of people approach networking in the wrong way. And this is such a tragedy because so much of the value of your MBA itself isn't gained in the classroom, it's actually from the relationships and the friendships that you build with your classmates and with your alumni network. Good morning! It's MBA Monday. I'm Angela Guido, the founder of Career Protocol and today I'm going to take a slight detour from our regularly scheduled programing to talk about an incredibly important concept to all MBAs: networking.

Friendmo: Network Building Made Easy!

In my vast experience coaching MBAs, what I've discovered is that most of us are taught the wrong way to network. We’re taught to think of it as a transaction, that there are people out there who have what we need and we have to go find them and get what we need so that we can get ahead. And this is absolutely the wrong way to think about building relationships. I mean, just think about the people in your life that are the most important to you. You're not doing deals with them. You're spending time, you're appreciating each other, you're sharing experiences. This problem is so big that I decided to do something about it. I built an app. I know me and everyone else say hello to Friendmo. Friendmo is designed to help you build meaningful friendships based on kindness and doing good for the people in your life. It's not designed exclusively for MBAs, but it is definitely going to be an incredibly valuable part of your network building strategy. Go check out the description below and click the link for your favorite platform. You can get it on iOS or Android and start using Friendmo today to build meaningful connections with the people in your network.

Think of Your MBA Network as a Friend Group

Here's a little cheat sheet about how friendship really works. Let me introduce you to the anatomy of a friendship from my book on networking, “How to Network Without Feeling Like an A-hole”.

Step one: make a connection.
Step two: create a future. This is just an opportunity to connect at some point in the future. Incredibly obvious.
Step three: shared positive experiences.
And finally (step four): shared connections.

The more shared positive experiences you have with members of your network, the more you're going to come to consider them friends. Similarly, and potentially more importantly, the more they're going to come to consider you a friend. And if you think about where opportunity comes from, especially later in your career, it comes from your friends. Because people want to work with people they like, they want to work with people they trust. If you want a really interesting job 10 years from now, it's probably going to come from a friend. We created, Friendmo, precisely to make it very easy for you to create shared positive experiences with everyone in your network, including your MBA classmates, your MBA alumni network, your coworkers, and absolutely anyone else that you want to be part of your life going forward in your career. I really hope you will check out Friendmo and I really hope you love it. We put a ton of love into building the app. I know you're going to love networking the FriendMo way much better than the transactional way that we're mostly taught. Have fun with FriendMo, I'll see you on next week’s #MBAMonday.