Group Assignment-Organizational Behavior

Group A8

1. Heidi follows the following general networking principle:

• She follows the Self-similarity Principle given that most of her connections were

related to her area of expertise (i.e. technology). For instance, she worked with Royal

Farros, a friend from Stanford, at T/Maker and had ties with her.

• Heidi also follows the Proximity Principle given that she was inclined to build ties in

the same department, units and teams as hers’. This was evident from the fact that she

connected with Tandem’s CEO for her Stanford recommendation.

• She also follows the shared-activity principle given that she was engaged with a cross-

section of people in the same activity. For instance, Heidi conduct house parties in

which she knew only half of the people she invited so that each person had the

opportunity to meet new people. Furthermore, since Roizen’s children and Vincent’s

children went to the same school, Roizen became friendly with Vincent and his wife.

2. Behaviours: Heidi was an outgoing high energy person by nature who had a genuine passion

for meeting smart and interesting people, as opposed to powerful ones. She had the art of

mixing professional and personal relations. She could convert a brief conversation to a

meaningful one by adding 1-2 unique ideas and making it a memorable one. She believed it is

better to know a person when they are not famous, so that when they are famous you already

have a relationship with them. She was grounded, genuine and was comfortable in various

situations,

Forming Ties: Being in Silicon Valley, she was surrounded by technology leaders. As the

editor at her first job, she was called to top management meetings. A Stanford School alumnus,

she had strong MBA classmates and an alumni network. She built relationships with members

of the press, so they reviewed her T/maker in their publication. She attended industry

conferences and events and made small informal conversations regarding the T/Maker. She

also joined technology groups like SPA, SEA where she was made the president; via which she
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Group A8

gained exposure to many industry leaders to discuss major causes and issues for which she

stood for.

Maintaining Relations: She connected two people within her network when it was a win-win

situation for both, only when it added value. She empathized with busy people keeping a tab

on how often she could approach senior people; Hence the senior the person, the lesser they

were approached. She maintained a balance in favours asked and given. She was an effective

e-mail user and after the first meeting sent an email establishing a flow of communication. She

was also known to host dinner parties at her house, where she cooked herself and asked others

to bring something too, to increase comfort. She was connected to nuclei of other networks,

and some non-nucleic people too to maintain depth and breadth. Even after rejecting a proposal,

she sent a mail to the company as she didn’t believe in burning bridges. She preferred

consistency and performance over interaction frequency.

3. The major strengths of Heidi Roizen’s networks is:

• It is a well-knit network of powerful individuals from the tech sector. Most people in

her network are influential personalities. As the network was initially built with

intention of attracting investors for startups, it had strong ties and was a clique where

all shared similar interests.

• The network is made of strong reciprocity which means network between parties where

both getting benefitted from each other.

Weaknesses of her network were: -

• As the network was well knit, the clique had very less members from the other areas

than tech. Due to strong ties, she has to invest a lot of time in them.
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Group A8

• Her network had depth but didn’t have the breadth required for venture capitalists. As

it was high reciprocity it became difficult for her to turn down the favors that were

expected of her.

4. The recommendations for Roizen to succeed as venture capitalist would be: -

• To develop a greater number of weak ties- She started building her network with an

entirely different goal of attracting investors for T/Maker and it as an asset while

working as a Mentor capitalist. But now that she has taken up the role of Venture

Capitalist, she should focus on forming weak ties which would require less time and

effort investment. More expansive network than clique network. As Heidi builds a

diverse network by attaching herself to new nuclei, outside her core, she gets to broker

career opportunities for her existing and new network simultaneously.

Strong ties Weak tie

• Build a diverse portfolio- As she stated that she was being type cast as desktop software

and operating system industries and not internet where she was interested; she should

diversify her network portfolio. While she had the William Dawes network as the

mentor and someone who is raising fund, she must diversify it to Paul revere and link

herself with different clusters so that she can reach to a wider audience. She should

focus on have no overlapping ties and thus a reach of 6 degrees.