Good Guys: Introducing Me

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.

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.

Because 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.

I'm hoping for all of the guys to make it good. Because we have a lot of purposeful work to do. So go ahead: make an intro.

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➡️ The Clip.

*This story was posted with permission of said IBMer.