Posted on: 1 October 2026
Anyone who has been to a few drinks receptions billed as networking knows the routine by heart. You drift towards a tall table with a glass in your hand, someone asks what you do, listens to the answer for exactly as long as it takes to work out whether you have a budget, and then starts telling you what they do and why it ought to interest you. If you have no budget the conversation dies within four minutes. If you do, it lasts a quarter of an hour and ends with a business card and a promise to catch up next week.
In that room "what do you do?" is not small talk. It is the first line of a sales qualification grid, the one American sales teams teach under the acronym BANT, which stands for budget, authority, need and timeline, so whoever asks it is deciding whether you are a person or a prospect, and you feel the difference even when nobody says it out loud.
It has always irritated me, and for years I put it down to people who simply don't know how to behave. I was wrong. Bad manners are distributed more or less at random, whereas this script repeats itself word for word in a Canary Wharf hotel and in Lugano, performed by people who outside that room are often perfectly charming. When a behaviour survives every change of cast, it is worth looking at the room.
In 1970 George Akerlof published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the market for used cars, and thirty-one years later it earned him the Nobel. The argument is well known. If buyers cannot tell a good car from a bad one they will only pay an average price; at that price nobody with a good car will sell, the average falls again, and eventually the forecourt holds little but what Americans call lemons. Economists call it adverse selection, and its nastiest effect is that simply being on the market becomes a piece of information, and a bad one.
A networking event works the same way, with one twist. The people in that room who could actually buy something, a chief executive or anyone who signs off a budget, know perfectly well that they would be treated as prey, so they stay away, or they put in twenty minutes and slip out before anyone spots them. They leave the market just like the owner of the good car, and what remains is a population made up largely of people who have something to sell and came precisely for that reason. A room of nothing but sellers has a curious property, because the price at which contacts change hands tends towards zero. Cards pass from hand to hand so easily because they cost nothing, and for the same reason they are worth nothing.
Nobody buys, and everyone goes home with a pocket full of cardboard.
Those who defend these events do have a serious argument, and they usually borrow it from Mark Granovetter. In 1973 Granovetter published The Strength of Weak Ties in the American Journal of Sociology, drawing on a survey of professional, technical and managerial workers in Newton, just outside Boston, who had recently changed jobs. He asked those who had found their new post through a personal contact how often they had seen that person around the time of the move. Some 16.7 per cent said often, 55.6 per cent occasionally and 27.8 per cent rarely. The information that mattered came mostly from acquaintances on the edge of their network rather than from close friends, who after all tend to know roughly what you already know. An entire industry of evenings and platforms has grown up on that finding, convinced that if you multiply your acquaintances you multiply your chances.
A few lines further on, in the same paper, Granovetter describes who those acquaintances actually were. Often an old university friend or a former colleague, someone with whom contact had been kept up only sporadically and whom the respondent had sometimes all but forgotten. These were ties formed around something people had once done together, kept alive by inertia. Not one of them had been approached with the idea of turning them into a contact.
In 1981 Scott Feld, writing in the same journal, gave that observation a theoretical shape. Social ties, he argued, organise themselves around what he called foci, meaning activities, places or institutions that bring the same people together again and again for reasons that have nothing to do with the relationship itself, such as a building site or a board of directors. The relationship is a by-product of the activity. Take away the activity and try to manufacture the by-product directly, and you get what you see in hotel function rooms on a Thursday evening: people talking to each other for the first and last time, with no reason whatsoever to meet again.
In 2007 two professors at Columbia Business School, Paul Ingram and Michael Morris, managed to look inside one of those rooms with a device that at the time seemed like a trade fair gimmick. They had a drinks evening organised for the executive MBA classes, on a Friday after work in a room in Warren Hall, with around a hundred guests drawn from management, entrepreneurship, consulting and banking, and gave each of them an electronic name tag that recorded whom they met and for how long. Before the evening almost everyone had said their aim was to meet new people. The tags showed they were far more likely to end up talking to the friends they had arrived with. The paper appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly under a title that already contains its answer, Do people mix at mixers?
When I think back to the contacts that genuinely changed the direction of a project, I always find a focus underneath. From 2004 I worked within the EDCF, the European Digital Cinema Forum, which for several years sat as an observer at the table where DCI was writing the standards for digital cinema. I met the people from that period arguing over specifications for hours on end, and some of them I ran into again years later in settings that had nothing to do with cinema. I cannot recall bringing home from a cocktail party a single relationship that outlasted two phone calls.
In Japan a business card is received with both hands, read with care and kept on the table in front of you for the whole meeting; writing on it or pocketing it without a glance is a small insult. Here it goes into a pocket before the other person has finished the sentence and into a drawer the following week, which may be the most honest gesture of the entire evening.
That leaves the irritation of the pitch, which has a more practical root than taste. Whoever opens a conversation by asking for something reveals that they need it, and in any negotiation the party that shows its need first has already given up the best part of its position. Introducing yourself without asking for anything, explaining what you do and leaving the other person to decide whether it interests them, is the only strong move available in that room. The catch is that you have to be able to afford it. Those who can afford not to sell have no need to go to the reception, while those who go usually cannot afford it, and adverse selection closes the loop on itself.
Events that work do exist, and they confirm the mechanism rather than disprove it. They are small, by invitation, built around a subject the guests have something to say about, sometimes with a concrete problem to chew over for a couple of hours before the wine arrives. The filter at the door keeps out a share of the sellers and the subject recreates a focus, artificial and lasting a single evening, but enough. A dinner for twelve built along those lines is more likely to produce a relationship than a ballroom with three hundred lanyards, for the simple reason that it gives the people round the table a reason to meet again.
If the invitation arrives anyway, the most useful thing to do is treat the evening as fieldwork and watch who is there, who is missing and who leaves after twenty minutes. The ones who leave early are often the only people in the room worth knowing; the trouble is that you only find out by watching them go.