1. a report by
V a l i o s o A B
Executive Database Ltd’s (eXDb’s) vision is to
provide decision-makers in the industry with an
optimal network of people, so they can conduct their
business in the most efficient manner possible. eXDb
helps people make connections and expand their
networks. You can network to expand your business,
build your competence and knowledge, find a job
and make sales. Members get a free networking-
oriented home page and can send messages to other
members. They can also join special networks related
to their part of the industry, interests or location.
eXDb Ltd, based in London in the UK, offers a
network database with in excess of 20,000 contacts
and cross-reference to company, areas of interest, etc.
In addition, eXDb Ltd offers tools to make any
database of contacts available into Microsoft®
Outlook® tools.
Our work concentrates on three components:
network building, competence transfer and business
politics. eXDb should be an important arena for oil
companies, consultancy companies, investors,
individuals and politicians. Utilising the network
one’s self and gaining access to a global network of
updated lists of industry people, will help the
industry bring down the total costs in various phases
of exploration and production work.
Network is a tool with which to increase the ‘control’
of the surroundings. The benefit of knowing many
people is that it provides access to more and varied
information, whether a decision-maker in a major oil
company or a consultancy company. One has to take
responsibility for one’s own daily business.
Network is highly underestimated, as about 70% of
the labour market is unseen, and tools are needed to
produce knowledge in this segment of the market.
Over 50% of projects are not found – and they need
to be brought out into the open.
More than 30% of a resource base is known to
industry when trying to staff projects, and
organisation of this information needed.
Several million people employ e-mail for a significant
portion of their professional communications. Yet, in
our experience, few people have worked out how to
use the network productively. A great deal of effort
is going into technical means for finding information,
but hardly anybody has been helping to figure out
where the network fits in the greater picture of their
own work.
We will attempt to fill that gap, building on the most
successful practices that we have observed throughout
our 20 years in the business. We will focus on the use
of electronic communication in the oil and gas
industry, but the underlying principles will be
applicable to many other communities as well.
The first thing to realise is that the realm of the
Internet is part of reality. The people you
correspond with via the network are real people
with lives and careers and habits and feelings of their
own. Things you say on the Internet can make
friends or enemies, famous or notorious, included or
ostracised. The electronic part of our lives should be
taken seriously. In particular, users need to think
about and consciously choose how they wish to
utilise the network.
e-Mail should be regarded as part of a larger ecology
of communications media and genres — telephone
conversations, archival journals and newsletters,
professional meetings, paper mail, voice mail,
chatting in the hallway, job interviews, visits to
clients, consultancy meetings and so forth Each
media possesses its own attributes and strengths.
The relationships among media will probably
change and new genres will probably emerge as the
technologies evolve, but it should be ensured that
the all-too-common fantasy is not harboured that
someday we will live our lives entirely through
electronic channels. It is not true.
One might engage in many forms of communication
on the net — one-to-one electronic correspondence,
application service provider solutions, Web
publishing and so forth. These interactions might be
employed as part of a wide variety of professional
activities: sharing data, setting technical standards,
collaborating on projects, chasing down offers,
Executive Database Ltd
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2. commenting on reports, editing job specifications,
planning meetings and trips, etc. Underlying all of
these different activities, though, is the activity of
building and maintaining professional relationships.
Electronic communication is wasted unless it is used
to seek out, cultivate and nurture relationships with
other humans. Unfortunately the existing
mechanisms for electronic interactions, by reducing
people to abstract codes (such as anyone@anybody.com)
make it difficult to keep this deeper dimension of
interaction in mind. Still, there is no escaping it –
unless you are consciously building relationships, you
are probably getting lost.
Our real topic is not (technological) networks but is
discussed in a general way before describing how it
can be accelerated by e-mail. In the past, the only
ways to learn networking were to be born to a
socially well-connected family or to apprentice
oneself to a master of the arts. This not to just being
part of a social network, but having the skills for
systematically seeking out and becoming acquainted
with new people in the service of professional goals.
Many people resist the idea of networking because
they associate it with ‘playing the career game’,
‘knowing the right people’, ‘kissing up to the
powerful’, ‘cynicism’ or ‘politics’, or because
networking supposedly takes time away from
‘getting real work done’. Some people grew up
being told the dangerous half-truth that ‘if you do
good work then you will be rewarded’, as if rewards
magically appear whether anybody knows about
your good work or not. Others are allergic to the
theory of ‘how to win friends and influence people’.
Indeed, people will accuse you of all sorts of terrible
things if you admit to having worked out ideas about
networking. This is all terribly unfortunate, not least
because it helps to stratify the world of the oil and gas
industry – networking is about community, not
hierarchy, and people who do not learn to network
are less likely to succeed.
The truth is that the world is made of people. People
outside of their communities are like fish out of water
or plants out of soil. Oil and gas projects of all kinds
depend critically on intensive and continually
evolving communication among people engaged in
related projects. Networking cannot substitute for
good science, neither can good science substitute for
networking. A job or a project can not be attained,
nor any recognition for your accomplishments, unless
you keep up to date with the people in your industry.
Establishing professional relationships with
particular people and involving yourself in the
industry will change you; not only will you
internalise a variety of interesting points of view,
but you will become more comfortable in your
writing and speaking because you will be engaged
in an on-going conversation with people you
know. If no circle of ‘followers’ is waiting for you,
you will have to go out and build a this, one person
at a time. This ‘overhead’ can be a nuisance at first,
but none of it is terribly difficult once you get
some practice and really convince yourself that you
cannot sustain your professional life without
devoting about one day per week to it.
T e m p t a t i o n s
Having surveyed the basics of networking and
professional relationships, it is time to consider the
role that electronic communication can play in
networking in the oil and gas industry. The most
important thing is to employ electronic media
consciously and deliberately as part of a larger
strategy for your work. It is fine to use the Internet
in other aspects of your life – seeking people to
correspond with, organising projects, joining a bid,
etc. – but, as long as you have your professional hat
on, every message you exchange on the network
should be part of the process of finding, building and
maintaining professional relationships. We cannot
emphasise this strongly enough, because e-mail
seems to provide endless temptations to the contrary.
These temptations include the following:
• the temptation to react;
• the temptation to treat people like machines;
• the temptation to pretend;
• paranoia
• the temptation to become overwhelmed;
• the temptation to become addicted;
• the temptation to waste time;
• the temptation to blame e-mail for problems;
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o R e a c t
e-Mail encourages reactive behaviour by making it
easy to respond with only a few rapid keystrokes.
Keep your cool. The more impulsive you are, the
more you are using the network to find friends as
opposed to colleagues and the greater your unmet
needs for affirmation and attention, the more you
will be led into reaction. One slip-up will not bring
your job to a halt, but you should definitely be aware
of the phenomenon. If someone abuses you in an e-
mail discussion, simply do not respond.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o
T r e a t P e o p l e L i k e M a c h i n e s
Basic politeness often erodes. It can take real work to
remind yourself that the person behind the e-mail
message is an actual human being and not simply
another name to add to your network. You can help
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3. Executive Database Ltd
keep network interactions on a human level by
taking special care about the basics of politeness.
More generally, practice coming up with positive,
non-obvious things to say about people and their
actions. It is more difficult than coming up with
negative things to say, of course, but it makes you
much more perceptive, articulate and diplomatic.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o P r e t e n d
Electronic communication affords the illusion of
semi-anonymity; since people only know you by
what you type, you may tend to lose the inhibitions
that normally keep you from pronouncing on
matters that you are not really informed about.
Pretending to know things is just as bad an idea via
e-mail as it is face to face. Remain focused on your
own unique professional contributions and let the
random chatter slide.
P a r a n o i a
Along with your own near-anonymity goes the
frequent difficulty of knowing who exactly is
receiving your messages. As a result, you may be
terrified to write anything for fear that you will be
dumped on by powerful experts — an experience
sometimes stigmatised (or even celebrated, as if it
expressed some kind of power) as ‘lurking’. The
solution is to focus on the careful, step-by-step
process of approaching individuals, leaving group
participation until you feel more comfortable –
which you will, eventually. Do not feel pressured to
participate before you are ready.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o
B e c o m e O v e r w h e l m e d
It is easy to sign up for everything that sounds
interesting, or to pursue dozens of people in every
direction, only to find yourself swamped with
messages to read and favours to return. If you are
getting more than about 20 messages a day, or if you
hear yourself saying: “it’s all I can do just to delete all
the messages that fill up my mailbox”, then perhaps
you should review your goals and adjust your mailing
list subscriptions accordingly.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o B e c o m e A d d i c t e d
Addiction means getting overwhelmed on purpose.
Few people take e-mail addiction seriously, but it is
a genuine addiction and it can be a self-destructive
waste of time.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o W a s t e T i m e
Random exploration will rarely yield network
information resources that are actually useful to your
real working goals. Useful information is always
bound up with useful people. Therefore, your
exploration of the network will most usefully be
guided by your goals and structured by the search for
people to add to your network.
T h e T e m p t a t i o n t o
B l a m e e - M a i l f o r P r o b l e m s
If you are a beginner with electronic communication,
you will probably have a few mishaps at some point:
getting put down by somebody, acting on an impulse
that you later regret, accidentally sending a message to
the wrong person, violating the obscure protocols of
professional communication, getting overwhelmed
with marginally worthwhile messages, finding yourself
trapped in long, complicated correspondences, or
whatever. When this happens, you might be moved to
blame the medium; you will find yourself saying that
e-mail is dangerous or worthless or overwhelming. Ask
yourself, do similar things happen in group meetings or
conferences or over the telephone or in paper mail? e-
Mail certainly has its shortcomings, but it is just a tool
like any other. You will have to learn how to use it,
what to use it for and when not to use it.
Of course, a few mistakes will not kill you and it is
equally as bad to go to the opposite extreme and
become a compulsive machine for scoring points and
making connections. What matters, understand
whatever it is you are doing within the larger picture
of your life and work.
C o n s t r u c t i v e U s e s o f
E l e c t r o n i c C o m m u n i c a t i o n
To determine the most constructive uses of electronic
communication, let us review the six-step networking
process outlined in this article and look for
opportunities to use e-mail to ease the various steps.
K n o w Y o u r G o a l s
e-Mail cannot help you much here. Indeed, you will
need to ensure that your goals are not defined
narrowly in terms of e-mail. Once you have begun
corresponding with people you consider wise, you
can begin to seek advice from them. Asking for
advice is an art in itself and, other things being equal
it is best done on an interpersonal basis but, once you
know someone fairly well on a face-to-face basis,
you can move some of the discussion to e-mail.
I d e n t i f y S o m e R e l e v a n t P e o p l e
The most fundamental way of finding people online
is to help them find you. This starts with your Web
presence. Your company Web page is a projection of
your company or persons – a way for people to
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4. know who you are as a member of the profession. If
you have had a past life in a professional field, then
you instinctively understand the point: your fate
depends on how people perceive you, and so it
matters what image of yourself you project.
Whenever possible, then, approach people as
individuals. What you can do is to send messages
individually to small numbers of people saying:
“Can I ask your help? I am trying to locate people
who are working on such-and-such. I have tried the
obvious sources, but without much luck. Any leads
you can offer would be much appreciated.” Only do
this if you have a specific purpose in mind for
finding such people.
W r i t e t o T h e s e P e o p l e I n d i v i d u a l l y
In the old days, the letter that was sent to approach
someone was printed on paper. Should e-mail be
used instead? We actually recommend using paper.
Electronic media should not be used, just because it
is modern. For one thing, paper is much easier to flip
through quickly or to read on public transport. It is
also much easier to write comments on. Use your
judgement. If you do decide to employ e-mail for
this purpose, use just as much care as you would on
paper. Remember that first impressions count. Do
not try to use e-mail for the ‘get-to-know-you’ type
of chatting that should logically follow at this point.
M e e t E a c h P e r s o n F a c e - t o - f a c e a t a
P r o f e s s i o n a l M e e t i n g
We believe, notwithstanding all the talk about
‘virtual reality’ and ‘electronic communities’, that
electronic communication does not make face-to-
face interaction obsolete. Instead, as stated at the
outset, you should think of e-mail and face-to-face
interaction as part of a larger ecology of
communication media, each with its own role to
play. In particular, you do not really have a
professional relationship with someone until you
have spoken with them face-to-face at length.
Having said that, the availability of e-mail will
nonetheless bring subtle changes to the ecology of
communication in your field. This is particularly true
with regard to the telephone, the uses of which
change considerably in e-mail-intensive communities;
in fact, that many people nearly stop using the
telephone altogether (or never learn how) and try to
use e-mail for unsuitable purposes like asking groups
for information that could have been gained more
easily through resources listed in the front of the
telephone directory.
It is amazing what can be accomplished over the
telephone once you learn how. The role of face-to-
face interaction will change as well, particularly since
many kinds of routine work can be conducted almost
as easily at a distance electronically as in formal
meetings face-to-face. Electronic communication
might even allow face-to-face interaction to shift its
balance from its practical to its ritual functions. In any
case, the general lesson is to pay attention to the
relationships among media so you can use the right
tool for each job.
F o l l o w - u p
Follow-up is an area where e-mail makes a qualitative
difference. Once a professional relationship with
someone is established, e-mail provides a convenient
way to maintain a steady, low-key background of
useful two-way interactions. You might wish to
forward things to people (reports, interesting
messages, business announcements, press releases,
book reviews. etc) or you might wish to recommend
their work to e-mail groups.
You might consider building an electronic mailing
list of people who share your interest areas and
would like to get interesting stuff forwarded to them
routinely – including, of course, your own work.
Make it a real mailing list, run on an automatic server
that allows people to subscribe and unsubscribe
automatically, rather than a long list of addresses that
you send a message to.
E-mail is obviously useful for a wide variety of
other purposes, for instance scheduling and
organising meetings. Make sure that some purpose
is actually being served; do not engage in
professional e-mail correspondence simply for the
sake of it. s
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Contact Information
Executive Database Ltd
61 Praed Street, Suite 107
London W2 1NS
United Kingdom
Tel: (44) 20 7644 5546
Fax: (44) 20 7706 1777
e-Mail: info@exdb.biz
http://www.exdb.biz