Heidi Roizen Case
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Heidi Roizen has invested considerable time and effort in developing and maintaining networks throughout her professional career. However, she encountered some obstacles after she transited to venture capitalist in Softbank because additional responsibilities occupied her time from previous networking. Therefore, Heidi should do differently to adjust her duties, while retaining those networks she difficultly built, by focusing on nuclei in networks, narrowing relationships with unnecessary contacts, and making communication more efficiently.
Strong networks should be built based on depth and breadth and be leveraged to create outside-inside links (Hunter & Ibarra, 2007). Heidi built and sustained strong networks before she transited to venture capitalist. She maintained connections through consistency and performance instead of frequency of interaction and was able to leverage her networks to a win-win situation (McGinn & Tempest, 2010).
Nonetheless, currently as a venture capitalist, Heidi cannot evaluate business plans and maintain her broad networks at the same time, so she needs to rearrange two duties. First, she built a too broad network that thousands of people feel they have a close relationship with her. Thus, Heidi should diagnose her network and identify her core cluster (Dunlap & Uzzi, 2005). Besides, she should avoid going deep with those average links in her networks. Furthermore, Heidi felt obligated to reply to every plan even if it is almost impossible to read and respond to an average of 10 business plans a day. Thus, she should be highly efficient in her communication techniques by keeping e-mails brief and to the point.
In conclusion, in order to create a healthy balance between Heidi’s job as the venture capitalist and her networks, Heidi should re-prioritize and adjust her duties through keeping close ties while ignoring non-nuclei, and making her communication techniques efficiently.