Achieving Success Through Social Capital: Tapping Hidden Resources in Your Personal and Business Networks [Hardcover]

Wayne E. Baker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0787953091 | ISBN-13: 978-0787953096 | Edition: 1

A Book in the University of Michigan Business School Series You can build it. You can use it. You'll prosper if you do. Discover a step-by-step program for tapping the hidden resources in your business, professional, and personal networks: your social capital. Here, an expert on building connections shows how building rich social capital produces higher pay, faster promotions, better jobs, breakthrough ideas, new business opportunities, and profitable companies.You'll learn how to develop your own social capital and use it to attain your personal and professional goals and, in the process, enhance your own health and emotional well-being.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Why do some people prosper while others struggle? The difference is more than what they know. It's also who they know. Successful people know how to improve their wealth, health, and happiness by creating rich social capital, tapping the hidden resources in their business, professional, and personal networks.Achieving Success Through Social Capital is your hands-on guide to success through building and using your social capital. You'll learn why rich social capital produces higher pay, faster promotions, better jobs, breakthrough ideas, new business opportunities, and profitable companies. Rich social capital can even make you luckier. You'll also learn why good networks are essential for your health and emotional well-being, and for a meaningful life even a longer life.With his 1994 business bestseller Networking Smart, Wayne Baker established himself as a leader in the social capital field. In this new book, he incorporates the latest findings about social capital into an empowering, practical, step-by-step program. He shows you how to move beyond the myth of individualism to the recognition that we are all connected and that connections are the keys to success. He guides you through the process of evaluating the quality of your current networks, improving your networks by applying dozens of proven practices, and using your social capital to invoke the power of reciprocity, helping yourself by contributing to others.Baker has helped thousands of people, companies, and associations discover the power of social capital, take charge of their networks, and create the vibrant networks they need to support their missions and achieve their goals. His books, workshops, and business courses enable people to learn, apply, and benefit from the universal principles of networks.Whether you're an entrepreneur with a growing business, a corporate executive trying to manage change, or a free agent in transitiondiscover the power of social capital. Learn to val

From the Back Cover

Why do some people prosper while others struggle? The difference is more than what they know. It's also who they know. Successful people know how to improve their wealth, health, and happiness by creating rich social capital, tapping the hidden resources in their business, professional, and personal networks.
Achieving Success Through Social Capital is your hands-on guide to success through building and using your social capital. You'll learn why rich social capital produces higher pay, faster promotions, better jobs, breakthrough ideas, new business opportunities, and profitable companies. Rich social capital can even make you luckier. You'll also learn why good networks are essential for your health and emotional well-being, and for a meaningful life even a longer life.
With his 1994 business bestseller Networking Smart, Wayne Baker established himself as a leader in the social capital field. In this new book, he incorporates the latest findings about social capital into an empowering, practical, step-by-step program. He shows you how to move beyond the myth of individualism to the recognition that we are all connected and that connections are the keys to success. He guides you through the process of evaluating the quality of your current networks, improving your networks by applying dozens of proven practices, and using your social capital to invoke the power of reciprocity, helping yourself by contributing to others.
Baker has helped thousands of people, companies, and associations discover the power of social capital, take charge of their networks, and create the vibrant networks they need to support their missions and achieve their goals. His books, workshops, and business courses enable people to learn, apply, and benefit from the universal principles of networks.
Whether you're an entrepreneur with a growing business, a corporate executive trying to manage change, or a free agent in transitiondiscover the power of social capital. Learn to value connections, reinvent your networks, and create blockbuster results. This book will show you how.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (August 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787953091
• ISBN-13: 978-0787953096
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #860,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Potential" Means "You Ain't Done It Yet" September 12, 2000

By Robert Morris HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This volume is one in the University of Michigan Business School Management Series. As Baker explains in the Executive Summary, "This book guides you through the process of evaluating, building, and using social capital." With precision and eloquence, Baker focuses on HOW to take full advantage of what he calls "hidden resources" in both personal and business networks. For example, in ideas, leads, business opportunities, financial capital, power and influence, emotional support, even goodwill, trust, and cooperation. Social capital consists of who you know, who knows you, and shared opportunities for you and them to derive mutual benefit. "The goal of building social capital as an organizational competence is the same as building it as an individual competence -- to increase the ability to achieve goals, fulfill missions, and make positive contributions to the world." Throughout the book's five chapters, Baker answers questions such as these:

* What is social capital?

* Why can it be so important to you?

* How to measure and evaluate your social capital?

* What are the most effective strategies for building entrepreneurial networks? (Baker suggests 30.)

* How to derive greatest benefit from your own social capital?

* How to build social capital as a competence within your organization?

If you seek answers to questions such as these, this book is "must reading."

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Finding out what we don't know, we don't know. August 12, 2000

By John G. Agno

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

For over fifty years, I have tied my shoes the same way. Then last month while getting a shoeshine, the shoeshiner told me that I didn't have to double them in order to keep my shoelaces tied. He told me that if I tied my laces by looping the lace under, rather than over the loop, I would tie a "square knot" that would hold. Every sailor knows how to tie a square knot but it took fifty years for this knowledge to get to me.

Just like tying your shoes correctly, there are many principles in life that we don't know, we don't know. For example, we have all heard the sayings, "It's not what you know but who you know that achieves success" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but most of us still believe in the myth of individualism. We embrace this myth and go about our lives believing that it is solely up to us to achieve success---without depending on the help of others to get what we want. Yet, as hard as we try, we can't seem to get it done alone.

This new book explains that it's not just what you know (but that plus who you know) that determines your success in life. The book proves that the myth of individualism keeps us from using our personal and business networks to gain the resources we need to excel in life.

Through reading Dr. Baker's new book (based upon principles like the "small-world principle" and the "law of reciprocity"), I found out about things I didn't know existed and how to use them to improve my life. This new book could be as important to my personal development as the social and time management principles I learned about when reading Dr. Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" several years ago.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The real scoop on "networking" March 14, 2004

By Donald Steiny

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

There are numerous books on "networking," with titles like "how to work a room." The theme is to get lots of names of people that you can call when you want to sell them something.

Wayne Baker is a respected researcher of social networks. This book gives a step-by-step method of analyzing one's own social networks and through them, learning more about oneself. These social networks are not groups of people that you socialize with, but rather the core people that make up your life, your family, your co-workers and others.

Having diverse social networks is a good indicator of many metrics of success and happiness. People with diverse social networks make more money, get promoted faster, ... they even get fewer colds. But how diverse is your social network? How can you improve it? This book shows how to figure it out and teaches about social networks while doing it.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars OK...But...A ***LOT*** of FLUFF! August 7, 2006

By Thelma Williams

Format:Hardcover

Not a bad book. It had some interesting pointers...BUT...as the title suggests... A LOT OF FLUFF!!!

It's not bad for the price (I URGE you to get a cheap USED copy)... but the same author has a MUCH stronger book called "Networking Smart". Very Good!

I gave this one star for the content... what was there, anyway.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Little useful content, master of the obvious August 12, 2007

By M. Andres

Format:Hardcover

This book was part of a class taught by the author. The class and the book are complete fluff. This book could conceivably be condensed into 25 to 50 pages and still make the same points.

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars In like a lion out like a lamb September 23, 2002

By P. Wood

Format:Hardcover

After an interesting and thoughtful start in Chapter 1 - I found the rest of this work to be very light and not very useful.
I read several other books in an effort to hone my corporate political skills in addition to this one, including 'NetWorlding' and 'PeopleSmart' before finding one that had the depth and subject treatment I was looking for. Check out 'The Secret Handshake' by Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Ph.D.
that's my take - loopster - Chicago