It’s not what you know, it’s who you know…

I got a great piece of advice from a custom furniture maker today. He commented on how high school popularity contests carry over into real world business. It’s not enough to just have the brains and the bright ideas, being able to convince others both inside and outside your organization to vote you for class president and thereby actually winning the high school election race is a far more determing factor in business success than brains and smarts. I would love to be able to argue against this point and then I realized that it came from an artisan who was basically telling me that his creative skills have nothing to do with how his furniture sells; it’s the salesmanship and networking that actually permit him to make a living off his craft.   A interesting reality of both the business and art worlds.