Brad Smith gave a decade of his working life to Andersen. Last year, he was a manager at the company’s M&A practice in San Francisco, and he was just a few years away from becoming a partner. Then Enron and Andersen became a single headline, joined in scandal. Enron went bust, Andersen collapsed, and Smith, simply because of the firm he worked for, became a victim of the company he’d kept. Chalk it up to guilt by association.
Of course, it’s never been good to be associated with crooks. But in the boom years, you thought about your network the same way you thought about your net worth: It could only go up.
What goes up must come down. These days, says Jeffrey Christian, chairman and CEO at executive search firm Christian & Timbers, “you have to be incredibly careful about who you associate with. Guilt by affiliation can kill a career.” Smith says that he hasn’t suffered because of the fact that he worked for Andersen — but he knows of former Andersen colleagues who have been viewed as “tainted goods.”
Today, networking is more about managing risk than about growing your Rolodex. Here are four tips from master networkers on how to make your network work for you.
