From Jane Wei-Skillern, David Sawyer, and David’s Ehrlichman’s The Most Impactful Leaders You’ve Never Heard Of, this excerpt serves as a jumping off point for the panel discussion of the Power of the Network at thrive! 2016:
How is the network entrepreneur different? Rather than leading with a top-down approach, network entrepreneurs focus on creating authentic relationships and building deep trust from the bottom up. This focus on relationship-building costs relatively little yet ultimately makes a tremendous difference in impact.
Jane Wei-Skillern (@jwei_skillern) is an adjunct associate professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and previously served on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School. For the past 15 years, she has conducted research on trust-based networks for social impact and taught graduate level courses on network leadership and culture, social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit strategy.
David Sawyer (@dhsawyer) is a partner of Converge, a strategy + design network for systems impact. Sawyer is a strategy guy for a better world, specializing in network, design, and systems thinking. He is active across all sectors and has played roles in a variety of fields: education reform, national service, social entrepreneurship, women and girls, venture philanthropy, and environmental preservation.
Victor Washington is the CEO of Washington and Sons’ A/C and Heating, a full service mechanical contractor with over 20 years of experience located in Houston, Texas. 2014 StreetWise ‘MBA’ TM alum, Victor has led his company to scale in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning industry by building a network of residential, commercial, and institutional clients.
Jean Horstman (@HorstmanJean) is the CEO of Interise, which partners with government agencies, anchor institutions and business associations to build the capacity of established small businesses in lower income communities, enabling them to grow revenues, create net new job growth, and be stronger community leaders. Working with 14 partners, Interise currently has programs in over 60 communities.