From my personal experience, increasing your Network base especially on professional platforms like LinkedIn, is very beneficial, so for those who are wondering what the purpose is or what’s the added value, below are a few lessons learned of how I personally found it useful:

• Mentoring / Assistance: In many cases, I connect with people and they send me a thank you message for connecting with them and indicate that they are new in a certain community or platform and wonder how they can start on so I help them out get started. Some people feel shy or not comfortable taking a first step so why don’t you take the first step.

• Enhancing the Community Engagement: Mentoring and assistance lead to enhanced member engagement within any community as soon as individuals get their head around it and understand how much of an amazing platform or community it is. Everyone of us should have a sense of responsibility towards the community they belong to and to one another.
• Connecting in Person: I connected with people in person via connecting through professional online platforms and became friends with some of them.
• Learning from Others: Don’t underestimate the power of learning from others experiences. It is amazing and I did learn a lot from so many individuals I virtually connected with. 

In summary, Networking has so many advantages of which one of them is Building Relationships. You just need to look at the positive side of things and look what’s beyond the number of connections you have. I am not saying I am interacting with all my connections, but I certainly did interact with a decent number of people. For example, interacting with 500 people out of the 10,000 in your network, is an outstanding accomplishment because while it maybe a small percentage in theory, it is certainly a significant number in reality.

Always remember, it is not about adding connections to increase your network count. It is about the whole package of being a member of a community, leading by example, contributing, helping, connecting, learning and the list goes on.

Thanks to everyone who gave me the honor to connect with them. There are lots of great people out there, so connect with people and start building relationships.

Network and let your Relationship Ship Sail towards Building Relations!

On one of the projects, JGC were our client / owner representative for one of the largest Gas to Liquid Projects in Qatar called: Pearl GTL Project. Frankly speaking, this was the most outstanding management experience I’ve ever had and I learned a lot from it. The project was worth more than $1 Billion US, very complex and running on tight schedule.

Over the years, I’ve dealt with many large international companies from different countries. They were all very professional but dealing with the Japanese took my experience to a totally different level:

1- Team Work: Although they were the client, they worked with us hand in hand as one cohesive team which resulted in significant positive added value to the project. We never felt they were our client.

2- Openness and Honesty: They built a level of comfort and confidence among everyone which resulted in a culture of openness, honesty and trust. Those are key success factors on any project.

3- Efficiency: They were always very efficient, to the point, hard working, very loyal to their company, committed to their work.

4- Attitude: They had an outstanding positive attitude and were very diplomatic to the extent that if they told someone “Go to Hell”, they might look forward for this trip.

5- Precision and Accuracy: Their drawings had minimal discrepancies which obviously minimized any re-work, change orders and variations.

6- Organizational Chart: They always respected the level of authority and reporting channels within their organization and ours. I’ve never seen them even for once, by passing anyone.

7- Punctuality: Always punctual, from higher management officials down to the inspectors. They used to be the first to report to work every morning because they believe that you have to lead by example.

8- Humble and Smart: They were very smart, highly educated and very humble – I’ve learned a lot from them because when you ask them about a certain thing, they do not leave you before they make sure you fully understood.

9- Meetings: Their meetings were always to the point, that’s why during most of our meetings with them, we used to end up with fruitful results in a very short time. They all come prepared (I’ve seen other companies who would come to the meetings with each attendee having his own agenda and the meeting could take forever) and they all spoke as one team, regardless whose idea was it.

10- Sense of Ownership: If anything went wrong on the job even if it wasn’t their fault, they would work with us immediately on finding a solution because they do have sense of ownership, not a blaming attitude.

11- No Arguments: They do not argue. This is a strength because they do concentrate on being productive rather than just being busy.

I have high respect for the Japanese culture, their management style and for them as individuals.

Always Remember: “Unity is Strength and when there is Teamwork and Collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved” – Mattie J.T. Stepanek