Businesses Say Networking Helps Them Succeed; Professors Have to Look up the Term Networking!

Article contributed by Dr. Ivan Misner. 

My recently completed Referral Institute study of more than 12,000 business professionals from all around the world has ended, and I’ve been going through mountains of statistics and data (oh joy).

I thought I might share an important one with my readers. This statistic will not surprise anyone in the real world (yes professors, I’m saying you live in a fantasy world): 91.4 percent of all respondents claimed that networking played a role in their success.

Only 6 percent said it did not, and I’m guessing that the 2.7 percent that said networking wasn’t applicable were the professors I just outed as being clueless about the real world.

If you think I’m being harsh, read my blog about my experience with the dean of a local California University who said that networking would never be taught in his school!

OK, so the rest of us aren’t surprised about this result, but here’s why I posted it: Finally, we have some empirical data as to how important business networking is to the success of a business! Maybe now that we are starting to have something boring – like hard data – more professors in business schools will start to teach this content.

Oh well, it’s good to have goals.