Heidi Roizen

MANA 6100 Organizational Behavior

Minor Write-up: Heidi Roizen

Xiaoyu Chang (Sherry)

Oct-04-2011

Networking is more than lots of names- By Heidi Roizen

Background

As an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture capitalist, educator and member of the boards of director of private and public companies, Heidi Roizen has been a legend of building her network and relationship with talented people in Silicon Valley. She has held positions of leadership within a number of industry organizations, and is a recognized and popular spokesperson for the technology industry and entrepreneurial community. But the most suitable title for her is still “networking builder”.

Strength and Weakness in Roizen’s Networking

Heidi’s network is large and powerful. The strengths of her network are throughout her career and specifically at Softbank, where her networking landed her the position of partner. The strengths of her network include penetrating the technology sector and becoming a celebrity of Silicon Valley. Through her network she was able to leverage these relationships to benefit her herself and others along the way. By establishing her guidelines she was able to healthily separate work and her personal life even though an outsiders’ perspective may think these boundaries are blurred in the case of Heidi’s dinner parties. As an out-going, high-energy person in nature, the genuine passion that Heidi had for meeting talented and interesting people contribute to her strength of networking. Her unpretentious, down-to-earth personality, which makes her appeal to people around her, plays the same key roles for her success.

Unfortunately networking doesn’t always come with upside. It is overwhelmingly time consuming. As the case mentioned, Heidi received upwards of 100 e-mails a day that she feels obliged to personally answer in order to maintain successful work-related and sometimes personal relationships. It also reflects poorly on Heidi because the 2000+ people she...