Tony’s business is all done through relationships. For Tony, it is who knows whom and how can you leverage those contacts to get what you need from the right person. Tony is deliberate and calculating about his relationships. He maintains police, union, political, and business contacts regardless of ethnicity, race, and, yes, even gender (the lovely Annalisa in Naples). He works through granting favors, reciprocity, and cold cash.
Because so much depends on these relationships, Tony protects them like the precious things they are. For example, he launders his money through the Russian, Slava. When Christopher and Paulie got too physical with Valery, Slava’s friend, Tony makes it clear to Paulie that if Slava makes the connection, it’s his problem. He does not want to be associated with the attack on Valery because it could harm his Slava relationship. The ferocity with which Tony protects his relationships and networks demonstrates how essential they are to his strategy.
While corporate leaders value relationships and networks, they don’t always view them as the strategic tools that Tony does. For many leaders, they remain tangential to their strategies, nice to have but far less important than the core ideas of the strategies themselves. In this traditional view, relationships are useful for supporting strategic initiatives. In Tony’s view, they are what make these initiatives succeed or fail.
In any global business, leaders are learning to cultivate relationships and connect to networks to achieve their strategic goals. For instance, one organization was seeking to acquire a small or midsize firm in China, but it was targeting a group of companies that were family-owned and weren’t actively interested in being bought. This U.S. organization learned that it couldn’t achieve its strategic goal simply by offering a lot of money or by making convincing presentations. It discovered that the first and most important step involved working through a network of current relationships to make contact with the right people in the targeted group of Chinese companies. Only through this network did the company have a chance to start a productive dialogue with the head of one of the family-owned companies. Contrary to its previous experiences, this organization found that it had to nurture relationships rather than make an offer to achieve its goal.
To leverage relationships and networks, try the following.
Don’t rule out untraditional networks or unlikely people. We all have our prejudices and preferences in these areas, as does Tony. Tony, however, rises above his biases for pragmatic business reasons. You may be biased against small companies that are only a fraction of your size or entrepreneurs who seem less than professional. You may find the experience of dealing with people in countries other than your own foreign in more ways than one. If so, you’re artificially cutting yourself off from people who may be critical in making a strategy successful. In a global, interdependent world, organizations need to forge alliances with individuals and groups who they may never have even considered doing business with in the past. Be open-minded in evaluating prospective contacts and partners. Even small companies today can deliver a lot of know-how for the money.
Act like a networker rather than a delegator. Tony knows how to work a room and press the flesh. He could simply sit in his office and give orders à la Junior and the other bosses, but he realizes that the stronger his relationships are with a diverse group of people, the better position he’s in to achieve his goals. Granted, not everyone has great networking skills, but it doesn’t require much skill simply to be proactive when it comes to meeting a wide range of people. When you look at every trade show, every cocktail party, and every charitable function as an opportunity to network, then you’re bound to form relationships that will dovetail with your strategic needs. I know an executive who makes a list of everyone he wants to meet before attending a trade show or conference, visualizing exactly who he needs to talk to and thus increasing the odds that he’ll actually talk to them. As he meets each one, he methodically checks their names off the attendee list.