Building you Intelligence Network
Wednesday, August 10th, 2016
Hey Ninjutsu fans I’m finally back from traveling around the States this past month. Now while I have been traveling I have also been building my intelligence gathering network. Establishing a strong network of individuals that feed you information isn’t that difficult to put in place and the rewards are fantastic. (I’ll share a quick example that just occurred in my work network that I have been cultivating)
So how do you go about building the network, well let’s keep this short lesson fairly brief:
- When you are in an event where you are meeting many individuals or just meeting someone for the first time, you have a great opportunity to add a node to your network. Learn their name and what they do for work and if the will share a bit about themselves what the enjoy doing outside of work.
- After meeting take notes on the individual and add them to your network by filing the information on mindmap. You may need several maps to encompass different networks ie:Work related, martial arts related, informational etc. (personally I have three)
- Routinely review and reach out to the individuals building your relationship with them and deepening the information you gather from them.
- Put the knowledge to good use!
Pretty simple process and yes it works! Here are a few examples,
On a flight out to Tennessee, I was seated next to a young lady who asked me about a book I was reading, I had already noticed what she was reading and struck up a conversation regarding the material in what she was reading, this lead us to exchanging business cards. A week later I reached out to say thanks for the conversation and when they wrote back it ended up with a big lead for me on a non profit organization that I am doing some work with now.
A recent martial arts gathering lead me to new contacts that have now hooked into my network and I have a new student who lives fairly close, that one of these individuals had spoken to them about training with me, new student has been on boarded!
A tier 1 operator that I trained some years ago, reached out and we are now sharing some training materials, this lead me to some great work with very talented individuals!
This are just a few examples of what a network can do for you, and I have hundreds of examples of this process and information that I have gained work to my family and my benefit. There is a lot that I cannot share for very particular reasons, but let’s just say a Ninja should always be prepared and in order to do so they require strong information from many sources HUMINT is only one.
Bufu Ikkan
Airyu – Living the Ninja Lifestyle!
