 Welcome back, everybody, and I hope you had a good break. It was, I think, Oscar Wilde, a great Irish wit, who, after me, like that said, have you had a nice dinner? And he said, yes, he said, but this wasn't it. But I would say that this was it. So thank you to all our friends here in Dublin Castle. Thank you to the IOM. Thank you for the Irish government for hosting this wonderful confection of people from around the world here today. So why me? Why am I getting this opportunity to speak today? Well, with my colleague, Dr. Martin Russell, whom you've heard from earlier, and in the networking institute, we've worked with, as Nosy said, many, many countries around the world. And we've always been fascinated by the power of diasporas. And this session, then, is a masterclass. It's about it's going to be something which is aimed at governments and nonprofits and at people who work in diaspora organizations. But also it's aimed at you. It's aimed at individuals just as much as it's aimed at organizations. And the objective is to convince you to put networking front and center of your personal and business lives. Having worked in six countries around the world, I realized that to survive and thrive, I needed to build strong and diverse networks. It wasn't a nice to have. It was a must have. It wasn't a luxury. It was absolutely a necessity. So why is diaspora networking so important now? Well, as previous speakers have mentioned, in 1990, the number of people living outside the country they were born in was 150 million. Today, as Minister Brophy said, it's over 280 million. And technology and communications are changing everything. In the old days, your geography dictated your identity. If you lived in Southern California, that's who you were. When you were gone from your home country, you were gone forever. Absent, equaled, exile. But now you can be here and there. You can live what we call hyphenated lives. You can be Australian and Greek. You could be Canadian and Polish. You can be French and Armenian. And now for possibly the first time in history, we can say geography is history. In fact, in this world we're living in now, it's possibly more important what you do than where you are. And so again, as somebody said this morning, what once lost actors in the diaspora can now become national assets. And there's a really interesting difference now between the states and the nation, the state being lines on a map, and the nation being a global notion, particularly applicable to small countries. You know, in our country here in Ireland, the bad news is that 10 million people have left this country throughout history. But the good news is we have a sort of empire built not by military might or force of arms, but just the fact that so many people went overseas and so many of them did really, really well when they were over there. In fact, I remember a time when the Prime Minister of New Zealand was called Muldoon. The Prime Minister of Australia was called Keating. The Prime Minister of Great Britain was called Callaghan. The Prime Minister of Canada was called Mulroney. The President of the United States was called Reagan, and you won't believe it, but the President of France was called De Gaulle, who traced his origins back to the McCartan family in County Down. So I think countries have now, through their diasporas, this fascinating notion of soft power. We don't have any hard power in Ireland. We're not planning to invade anybody anytime soon, but soft power, as articulated by Professor Joseph Nive Harvard, means the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion. So it becomes about your culture, your values, your political views. The US State Department began to call it smart power. Our notion here in this small little island, off an island where it rains a lot, is to be a small island at the center of the world. And the wonderful thing about diasporas is that they're highly motivated, they're emotionally engaged, they have a great sense of belonging, they're such a thing as a patriotic dividend, they're proud, and they have networks locally and globally, and they often have resources, which they want to bring into play. Now I'm a fan of Ann Marie Slaughter, the Princeton professor, and she talked about how the information age is over. We now live in the network age. The vertical world of hierarchies has been replaced by a horizontal world of networks, and the measurement of power is connectedness. The network power comes from having the maximum number of good networks, good creative people, clusters of creative people. The world is more mosaic, she says, than a melting pot. And now she says, it's where you're from, it means where you can and do go back, and whom you network with, and whom you trust, which is such an important thing. So in my experience working in these different countries with diasporas and developing diasporas networks, I learned kind of four key lessons. The first one is that nobody started a large organization. Everything starts at zero. The 21-year-old son of a Syrian migrant in a garage in Cupertina, California, Steve Jobs, with 27-year-old Steve Wozniak, put together the first bits and pieces of a computer which they sold, and that started the Apple company, now a $3 trillion company. Just down the road in a garage, there was two people, one called Hewlett and one called Packard, and you know what they did. Not too far away, another shed with a Disney. Walt Disney created his first cartoon. And you look at things like Facebook and Amazon and how they started in dorms or in somebody's front room. Or here in this island, Ryanair started with one plane and 18 passengers in 1985 flew from Waterford to London. And I worked for an organization, a diaspora organization, called the Ireland Funds. Set up by two inspiring individuals, a guy called Tony O'Reilly, the head of the Heinz Food Company, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And they thought, could we put together a network in the United States, in the Irish diaspora, and could we even begin to emulate what the Jewish community had done for Israel? Could we do something similar for Ireland? And we had a great fundraising dinner in the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Invited the great and the good. The dinner was so unsuccessful that the only reason we had a second dinner a year later was to pay for the first dinner we had. And that's $700 million ago. Nobody started a large organization. When I went to Australia, I knew nobody. I called a friend of a friend and said, introduce me to the local Irish business network. It's their recent one. I said, let's set one up. I said, we had six people show up. And now 35 years later, there's 5,000 people. And it's the biggest St. Patrick's Day business lunch in the world. Nobody started a large organization. I'm a founder member of a group called Case. Case stands for copy and steal everything. Go figure. Who's doing this diaspora stuff well and see what might work? Our founder, Tony O'Reilly, in that first dinner, he had was quite a funny speaker. And we had a slogan, peace, culture, charity. And he said, we're going to change it. To look Irish, dress British, think Yiddish. If you could get those three things together, you might have something going. The second point I learned is one introduction, one conversation can change your life. I love the story of an Irish president of a university was on a plane and he started chatting to the guy next to him, whose name was Chuck Feeney. They got to know each other. He invited them to visit Ireland. Chuck Feeney was Irish American. He'd made a lot of money and duty free. He was a disciple of Andrew Carnegie, the great Scottish philanthropist who believed that he who dies, thus rich, dies disgraced. That what you should do at your wealth is actually give it away in your lifetime. And that's what Feeney decided to do. And he ended up giving over a billion dollars to institutions, mostly educational institutions in Ireland. We would not be where we are today without that one diaspora person who was made that extraordinary contribution over many years to Ireland. The third thing I realized that life is a game of inches. We see it in sport every day. The difference between winning and losing is tiny. The U.S. Masters in Golf is next weekend. We'll probably be won by one shot. We will all remember the winner and nobody will remember who came second. Life is a game of inches. And you see it in lots of different ways. I used to work for IDA Ireland, the investment agency, to bring companies into Ireland from overseas. Intel was a client that we wanted to get to locate their manufacturing unit in Ireland for Europe. And they came and looked at Europe and they decided to locate in Scotland. And when we asked them why, they said, because Scotland is part of a bigger domestic market and Scotland is more electronic engineers coming out through its education system. And the head of the IDA then said, give us two weeks. And he got a recruitment company and researched the diaspora, the Irish diaspora, of electronic engineers working around the world. And they located and identified 1,000 and they spoke to them and 80% said, if Intel come to Ireland, we will come back. We want to come back and work for Intel in Ireland. And when that was presented, that information to Intel, they changed their decision. They decided not to go to Scotland. They came to Ireland. They've invested over 20 billion in Ireland. They have thousands of employees and they're investing more and more. The difference is absolutely tiny between winning and losing a foreign direct investment. And so your network can be what I call the nudge factor. And if you can find people in your diaspora who are willing to make the right introduction, to put the right word to the right person, we used to call these people tipping agents that they might tip a deal in our direction. And I'm a fan of a theory of marginal gains that sometimes being 1% better doesn't get you 1% more. It gets you everything. And sometimes being 1% worse doesn't get you 1% less. It gets you nothing. And your diaspora can be that 1%. They can be a difference maker. The third thing I learned is for a diaspora initiative to succeed, you really need three things. You need a great case, powerfully articulated. You need a constituency. And that means you need to know who they are, where they are, what they're doing. You need to know that information. And the third thing you need is you need leadership. And of all those three, probably leadership is the most important. And that's one of the reasons why we need to teach and train people to be leaders in the diaspora. But the overarching element in all these things and all these activities was actually networking. And I wasn't very good at networking early in my career. Then I realized, we all have two types of network. We have an organic network, which just happens. You're born into it, your family, your friends, the school you go to, the sports you play, where you go on holidays, that just kind of happens. But as you progress through life, you have to develop a network which is thoughtful, intentional, and strategic. And nobody is born being a great networker. It's something that you learn through experience. And perhaps, perhaps, schools and colleges are to blame because to make progress in a school or a university, you need to get a mark, a grade, a score, a metric. And then you get into the real world. And there's a whole series of things that really count but can't be counted. Things like empathy, emotional intelligence, attitude, character, resilience, determination, grit, humor, or as we say over here, crack. Which means I have to say in Ireland, having fun, it's not a substance. All of these things count. So I decided to take an air miles approach to networking. You build them up, you build them up and build them up and then every so often they come in really, really handy. I looked at my network as a bit like an ATM. And if you keep taking money out of the ATM, sooner or later a flashing sign comes up that says insufficient funds. So you've got to put money back in. With your network, you've got to put it back in. I took the IKEA approach to networking. The more time and effort you put into building and constructing your network, the more you have a sense of ownership of it. So what then is networking? Networking is building long-term, hearts and minds, sustainable relationships. Kind of everybody agrees that. But not everybody would buy into the second half. Networking is not about getting. Networking is about giving. It's based on a simple premise. The more you give to individuals on a consistent basis, the more it comes back to you from the network. It's about moving your mindset from being transaction driven to being relationship driven. And it's not about any one big thing. It's about a lot of small things, which if you do on a daily consistent basis, they become habits, they become rituals and they become frankly part of who you are as a person. But in all of this, you do have to consistently ask yourself the three brutal questions about your network. Is my network good enough for where I wanna be in the next few years? What do I need to do now to get ready for this post-COVID period? And I have a network, but is it the right one? And to make things work in networking, you have to take action. Because if you don't take action, quick as a flash, nothing happens. And you know the way it is. You can't learn to swim by reading a book. You can't learn to ride a bike by watching a video. You've gotta do this stuff. And one of the first things we can all do with our diaspora, with ourselves, is actually to audit our network, to print off our network and to look at it. And when you look at it, you'll realize a few things. You'll realize that you can clean up your network. We sometimes say prune your network and watch it grow. You can also get rid of redundant entries. Get rid of those takeaway stores and cities you no longer live in. You'll realize you have some gaps in your network. So you'll know where you have to spend some time filling those gaps. And you'll also discover something else. You used to know some people really well in the past and you've let them slip. What we call your dormant connections. Great connections in the past. You had a great relationship. Nothing happened. You didn't have a row or dispute. Life got in the way. You went this way, they went that way. And connecting on a regular basis can be extremely beneficial. Because you can pick up where you left off. You can learn so many new things. Under when COVID hit here, two and a half years ago, I started ringing one person a week, over 80 people. Always ring, speak, telephone, not text, but just speak to these people. And it's been fantastic. But you also have to look at your network because not everybody is the same in your network. You have to segment your network. And I think it's like a pyramid. At the bottom of your pyramid is we call it a contact. And a contact is a name on your network and for the life of you, you can't remember who they were. But moving up the pyramid, the next category is a connection. You know them, they know you. If they called you, you'd know who they were. You're not doing anything, but there's an element of familiarity. The next level up, it's a relationship. You know them, they know you. You're doing something together, you know each other, you like each other, you trust each other, and you're doing business together. And that's fantastic, particularly that trust bit. Because we live in a world where trust is at its lowest level in recorded history, according to the Edelman annual trust survey. Trust in government, nonprofit, media and business is at its lowest level. And you don't meet somebody today and trust them tomorrow. Trust is not earned, trust is deserved. So you've got to figure out a way of building this trust. And the top level of my pyramid is it's just a friend of it. People I work with are friends, I'm friends with friends. But I don't have many in that category because I define it as somebody you call on their cell phone on a Sunday afternoon. I wouldn't do that to many people. So when you look at your network, in your diaspora, in your organization, and you think in terms of that research you've just done, building your network is about cultivation. It's about bringing people on a journey of total ignorance of view in your organization to a position of passionate zealotry. And that takes time, that takes energy, that takes enthusiasm. It's a journey because you know life is about the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. The left side of the brain won facts and information, statistics, the right side wants purpose and meaning and empathy. But in life when left comes up against right, right always wins. The left leads to conclusions, the right leads to action. And that's what's so great about diaspora. There's so much passion in this business. I've always liked the comment somebody said to me is that, you know, Martin Luther King said, I have a dream. He didn't say I have a strategic plan. I think that's very powerful. So you have research, you've cultivation, you have solicitation. It's the power you have to be an asker. Somebody I think mentioned this morning about the importance of asks and tasks of your diaspora. If you don't ask, you don't get. And then there's that wonderful period of what we call stewardship, which is like after sale service. The number one reason somebody in the diaspora gives up doing business with an organization is they detect the spirit of indifference that somehow or other, we take their support for granted. So why then am I saying that diaspora networking is now more important than ever? Well, the reality is that under COVID, there's a hidden cost that we've all paid. Our networks have shrunk. We've hunkered down with friends, family, and a few business connections. We've moved attention away from strangers. See, networks don't normally shrink. They kind of churn. You replace old connections with new connections, but we've lost that. We've spent time with our inner concentric ring of contacts, not our outer concentric ring, and that's where opportunity lies. And frankly, in life, you can't go to loam. You need your connections in the diaspora, and the diaspora need their connections in the diaspora. There is this myth of individualism sometimes out there that life is all about the lone ranger, the Marbra man, the Wonder Woman, up against the world, the individual, the rugged individuals, winning, fighting, all that kind of stuff. No, life is about connecting, collaborating, cooperating. Opportunities don't float around on clouds. They're attached to people. If you're looking for an opportunity, you're really looking for a person. And networking in their diaspora is a way to do lots of good practical things. It can help you get sales and jobs and investment and fine stuff. That's all great stuff. But the reason I particularly am fascinated by networking is that people who have strong and diverse networks live longer, are stronger mentally and physically, earn more money, and are happier, kind of like all of those. And networking is the antidote to one of the great crises of our time, which is loneliness. Somebody said to me the other day, when you think back in your life, what were the most exciting times? When you were in front of a screen, or when you were with other people? I think we'd all agree it's when you're with other people. So your network allows you to escape your, allows you to escape, sorry, network allows you to escape your silo. You know, we're all busy being busy. There is this issue of homophily as well, which is in homophily's kind of fancy Greek word, saying the tendency we all have to spend time with people just like us. When I grew up in this city of Dublin, we used to call it male, pale, and stale. And now it's completely different. Think of these statistics. 14% of the United States were not born in the United States. In Ireland, it's 17%. In Dublin, it's 25%. Of the working age population of Dublin, it's 30%. But here's the question. Does your network reflect the diversity of the society you're living in, the economy you're working in? And all the research from the McKinsey's and Baines and Deloitte's that if that's the case, then you under deliver. Your network, frankly, is the way you're gonna get your next job. My dad left school at 14, joined a company, left that company at age 77. You know, just a quick 63 years in one company. In the old days, companies outlived people, but now people outlive companies. The average length of a company is 20 years. The average length of an individual in a C sweet position is seven years. And networks are portable, they're yours. You built them, when you go, they go with you. And companies want to hire and wire. Companies want to hire people and wire into their network. Now when you're being interviewed for a job, people wanna know about your qualifications, they wanna know about your experience, all those things, but they wanna know something else. They wanna know who you know. Because we live in a world where it's not what you know, it's not who you know, it's who do they know. So that again becomes critically important. And there's an interesting thing in this. You won't build a network in your diaspora or even in your regular lives. Unless you get comfortable doing something we all struggle with, me included, which is talking to strangers. And when you think about it, what do we teach our kids? We say, don't talk to strangers. And yet here's something interesting. Statistics show that our kids are more danger from friends and family than they are from strangers. And so we have to find a way that we seek out unlike-minded people and we talk to strangers. And there is such a thing as network intelligence. The notion that there's more smart people outside your organization than inside your organization. And your network is your way to find out what's going on in your industry, your segment, your sector, your geography, what's happening in the world. But of course, we're struggling today with what we call black swan events, COVID, climate change, the invasion of Ukraine. So here's the question. Do you think we'll have more or less massive events in the future? Most people will probably say we'll have more. So we're living in a world of great disruption and turbulence, but also I have to say opportunity. But companies are gonna reconfigure their networks. Individuals will have to reconsider their career options. And so we have to say that success in the future is not guaranteed. Success in the past doesn't guarantee success in the future. The strategies that got us here won't get us there. As Peter Drucker, the American Management Consultant, said, to create the future, you have to be the enemy of today. Our Charles Darwin, the British Anthropologist who said, it's not the strongest of the species that survives. It's not even the most intelligent. It's those most able to handle change. And so if I had said to you just 10 years ago, I'm in my Uber on my iPhone, booking an Airbnb in Dublin. The only word in that sentence that you would understand is the word Dublin, because those three other things didn't exist 10 years ago. But here's the question. What are the three things 10 years from now, that would be just in common parlance with all of us, but we don't know what they are. But there are problems with networking. I'd be the first to admit it. Most people hate it. There's a difference between the noun network. That sounds pretty good and positive. And the verb networking, which frankly sounds a little bit sleazy and sincere and authentic. As I said, it's not taught at school or college. Companies sort of strategies for it. It's not a KPI. People say it's not my job. It doesn't show up in the recruitment policies and programs. People mix up networking and sociability. They think that the most sociable person is the best networker. But here's what's interesting. Introverts can be better at networking than extroverts. And why is it? Because they do it with decency and authenticity and integrity. They ask questions and they listen. All the things the extrovert doesn't do. Who's there trying to wow you and look over your shoulder to find somebody more interesting to talk to? And many people don't realize that in your network, you need three types of people. You need somebody who's an advisor to you, helps you technically do what you wanna do. You need to have a mentor. A mentor who gives you the good, the bad and the ugly, might be in your organization, might not be in your organization. But you need something else. You need a sponsor. A mentor talks to you. A sponsor talks about you. And this is important. That's Carla Harris, the great African American in Wall Street, 35 years, and Morgan Stanley says, wonderful YouTube videos and TED talks. She says, always remember every major decision about you, about your career, about your life, about your compensation, about the next projects you take on would be taken by a group of people sitting around a table in a room and you won't be in that room. So this is fascinating stuff. So what, having worked in diasporas and worked around the world with the Ireland funds and with other organizations, I've realized that there are certain characteristics of great diaspora networkers. First of all, they work hard at it. You know, work is part of the word networking. They're humble. They don't brag. They don't keep score. They don't say, not say, you owe me one because I did you a favor some time ago. They're quietly confident that this works. They think like farmers who plant the seed, waters, nurtures and just knows that there's gonna be a harvest. They understand there's two types of information in the world. There's formal information. You can read it, you can Google it, and you can read reports, but that's available to everybody. You can't compete on what everybody knows and there's informal information, nudges, tips, winks, gossip, all those things come from your network. They realize that great networkers in the diaspora realize you've gotta be high tech, you've gotta understand technology, use technology, but you gotta be high touch. They remember the great words of Dale Carnegie in his book, how to win friends and influence people. When he said, people do business with people they like and trust. And great networkers understand the power of weak connections. Weak connections will bridge you into all sorts of different people in different places. So what then are the skills you need to be a world-class diaspora networker? Well the single most important skill in diaspora networking is to be a great listener. I was just talking before, earlier this today about how India in 2002, they put in place the commission of the high level commission of the Indian diaspora to go out and listen to the Indian diaspora before they wrote this massive and very influential report. And you know the greatest gift you can give anybody in life is the gift of rapt attention. And remember I said networking is all about giving. Most people don't listen. Most people think that listening is a sign of weakness, have not been an expert. Most people only listen to prepare what they're gonna say next. So if you think of listening as a form of activity, if you listen not just to what somebody is saying but what they're gonna say next, it becomes really, really powerful. The second thing I think as a characteristic of networking, particularly in the diaspora, my experience, was what I call follows of serendipity, randomness, luck, chance. So the question is, can you make luck and chance happen for you? Or is it just something that happens? Like a bolt of lightning, like a sort of winning the lottery? Or is that actually something that you can make happen for you? Put it this way, randomness, chance, serendipity, doesn't happen lying in bed or sitting at your desk. It happens when you're in motion. It happens when you're out and about. It happens when you change your routines, when you do stuff, when you talk to strangers, when you seek out unlike-minded people, when you build your weak connections, when you speak publicly, when you become and have a presence online. Guess what happens? Chance enters your life. So I see serendipity as a bit like a gentle wind that's always at your back and that you can catch it and make it work for you. Planning will get you to the tip of the iceberg. Luck and chance will get you that bit of the iceberg which is underwater and is, of course, seven-eighths of the iceberg. We tend in life to overestimate how our ability helps us achieve things in life and underestimate the rolled chance. So here, then, are the three questions that you should ask everybody in your diaspora when you meet them, really simple questions. The first one is, what can I do for you? Not the other way around, which is what most people think about networking. The second one was, if you were me, what would you do? And here you're paying respect and deference to wisdom and experience, you're listening and people love giving advice because it's free. And the final question is, who do you know who? Who do you know who lives in Argentina? Who do you know who works in aircraft insurance? Figuring out just those different areas that you need to build up some experience. You need to build up some connections because what you're really saying is, do you trust me enough? Have you a strong enough relationship with me that you're willing to put your name on the line to make that introduction for me? So I think that to summarize, there's some fundamental questions of your diaspora, of the relationship with the diaspora which would bring about great success. The first one is to be able to answer that key question about who are they, where are they, what are they doing? The second one is the realization, there's no such thing as an Egyptian or a Dutch or a Canadian diaspora. There's dozens, there's hundreds of them and you have to segment them. It's all about finding overachievers and successful people in the diaspora and linking them with overachievers and the successful people in ours. It's about this notion of managed serendipity. It's seeing philanthropy, which we talked about this morning as a portal to engage people and once you get them engaged in philanthropy then you can open up into lots and lots of other areas. There's this whole notion of diaspora capital made up of flows of people, flows of money and flows of information and taking hold of this concept of diaspora capital that every country, city, region possesses this in varying various degrees. It's because taking serendipity and making it work for you is building weak connections. It's listening to your diaspora. It's giving to your diaspora. It's identifying the business rock stars in the diaspora. I just talked over lunch about Indra Nui, the wonderful Indian born and educated head of Pepsi had a stellar career in the United States but she's also head of the US India Business Council. Mokhtar Kent, the head of Coca-Cola was head of the US Turkish Business Council. Andrew Livers, the head of Dow Chemicals was head of the US Greek Business Council. Craig Barrett, the head of Intel was head of the Irish Technology Leadership Group in Silicon Valley. So what was happening was these people were identifying with that country of heritage or ancestry or affinity. And so these are all real powerful things. So I've been knocking around this space for quite a few years and I think probably the most exciting thing that I'm seeing now is the explosion of young talent that's coming into the diaspora engagement space. And none more so than my colleague and friend, Dr. Martin Russell, who we've been with all this the last day or two and has done so much to make this conference successful. He's had a huge contribution. He's launching shortly GDI, Global Diaspora Insights, his own advisory research and policy services firm. So I wish you luck, Martin. We've done lots of projects in the past. I'm sure we'll do lots of projects in the future. So that's what it is, ladies and gentlemen. My objective is to encourage you to replace cold calls with hot coffees by being great at networking. Thank you very much.