Good Guys: You Introduce Us

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It's something about the good guys these days. Personally, I am looking for them. Relentlessly, every single day. Some days, they are hard to find.

Luckily for me, I don’t have to go far to think of one - I just have to start a revolution: a quick trip down memory lane. See, the good guys have been there all along. And I worked with loads of them at IBM.

Recently, I've been seeing them a lot too. Mostly on LinkedIn, probably because I engaged with too many watsonx posts - we do have a history. Or maybe because I congratulated one I love on achieving a major professional accomplishment - there have been many of those to celebrate!

I wound up on the phone with one of them good guys*. The one who stayed by my side for months architecting a pitch. And up all night with me and the team as we submitted a ginormous bid, in Excel and in German, at the wee hours of the morning, against a deadline 6 time zones away. That kind of love.

We had the best catch up and I left that phone call feeling reenergized. And with 2 introductions - that I rapidly turned into 2 meetings.

It took him 2 LinkedIn messages - about 150 written words - to spread the love.

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I showed up at my second meeting of 2 last week. With a C-Suite big insurance exec. One I imagined so busy, I would not have been surprised if he'd canceled on me last minute. No agenda. No deck.

When I showed up on Teams at 9:59AM, he was already in the meeting. This good guy, on the ready to connect with me!

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"I have a couple ideas on how I can help.." are the next steps he proposed.

The only action item he gave me: "Send me your Clip". ⬇️

It took him one email and one minute. I got another intro.

Spreading the love.

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For the good guys, it's literally as easy as that.

Yet their decision to use their gravitas and endorse me in their community acts as a multiplying force for progress, for all of us.

It's that simple. An offer of introduction.

Introductions serve as an open invitation to explore and begin dialogue inside a community one doesn't normally have access to. It's the biggest accelerator to the progress we all want to see.

How I See It | Introductions spread the love.

I'm hoping for all of the guys to make it good. Because we have a lot of purposeful work to do.

Go for it. Make an intro.

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➡️ The Clip.

*This story was posted with permission of said #IBMer.