Jim Flowers just become a real fan of Karl Fisch. Read what follows and you may, too. Here's a excerpt from a recent post on Karl's blog.
As I was thinking about this the other day for some reason an old phrase popped into my head.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Now, I’ve never really liked that phrase because it seemed to elevate connections over competence, but I’ve also always realized that there has been some truth in it (whether I liked it or not). But for some reason my brain connected it with my musings about an “elevator pitch” for PLNs, [personal learning networks] and what came out was:
Who you know is what you know.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying that there’s no need to know things – we all still need to know quite a few things, and how to do quite a few things. But I think that phrase is increasingly becoming true, that who you know – your PLN – more and more defines what you “know” and are able to do.
If you have a well-developed, well-nurtured learning network, and you have the access and the skills necessary to utilize it, then you “know” more than someone who does not. You truly have the ability for “just in time” learning. You can reach out to your PLN with a question, with something you want to know more about, and they can help you learn about it. Even if someone in your network isn’t an “expert” on the topic, more than likely someone in your network knows someone who is.
Thank you, Karl, for this incredibly useful clarification. It bears directly on something I recently blogged on Startup Professionals Musings. Relationships are unbelievably powerful tools for entrepreneurs - and for the rest of us, too, of course. Every relationship is a potential Mentor, someone from whom I can receive interpreted information - not instructions, mind you - but the information I need to make better decisions.
Karl echoes and amplifies what my friend and colleague Anne Clelland says in her Handshake 2.0 tag line, "It's still who you know!"
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