"Increasingly?" While new technology has certainly magnified the effects of this dynamic and enhanced its global character, as well as lowered its cost, and gr

"Increasingly?" While new technology has certainly magnified the effects of this dynamic and enhanced its global character, as well as lowered its cost, and granted new conventions, mannerisms and particulars to our experience of it, this does not strike me as a particularly novel thesis, in the grand scheme of things. Businesspeople - invariably, of the "people person" variety (a seeming requirement for the transaction of commerce) - have always known personal connections and seemingly random events to be the fabric of marketing and selling, and have been doing it for as long as labour specialisation has been around, it seems to me. Who doesn't know that meeting people and swapping information increases the statistical incidence of striking some kind of deal with someone, somewhere? Sure, it's been explicitly codified in management lore in recent times with given buzzwords like "networking" and "mixers," to be sure. This is part of the ongoing tendency by bureaucratic management thought to take the timeless commonsensical narratives of the small proprietor/artisan/craftsman/merchant and extract from them some abstract unifying thread, some principle, some Powerpoint-worthy pithy platitudes to which the audience instinctively relates and shells out for at $300/hr because of the psychological positive psychological feedback it provides, that sense of empathic affirmation. It's that warm feeling that what one has always known to be true is now also Officially Certified as true by an awe-inspiring, credibly gigantic intra-industrial actor, and perhaps has even had a proper noun-phrase bestowed upon it, or, assured a permanent place in some kind of canon through elevation to the status of a bona fide methodology! This is how the management consulting arms of the Big 4 make their money, among others -- by packaging up this kind of vapid crapola. Has anyone yet been invited to the new webinar, "Focus on Dextrous Fingers: The Central Touchstone to Success in 21st Century Piano-Playing?" It seems self-evident that one maximises visibility and draws on a sense of personal partisanship as well as accumulates valuable information in the course of hanging out with members of one's target market as well as one's peers/partners/complements. I would say this is a truism almost worthy of anthropological generalisation in connection with the history of trade.