In today’s business world, we’re regularly invited to participate in phone calls to discuss “synergies.” Back in the day, this was called a networking call. But the term networking has been declared so 1990’s and synergy appears to be the new, hip term of the moment.
As a small business owner, I’m all for synergy calls. It’s great to meet people, put voices with emails/tweets/etc. and talk about ideas that could lead to future opportunities. However, the resulting synergy is only as good as the initial phone call. And since we don’t get the benefit of body language over the phone, it can sometimes be a challenge to create real synergy in a short phone call.