In today’s understanding, „networking“ is the typical American-inspired running around, making quick contacts, hectically handing out business cards, „making small talk“. I have been doing this for years and now I am quite allergic to it.

Yes, of course. But most people believe that this is hunting. But it is rather agriculture. Thanks to Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn and our constant accessibility with our cell phones, we now believe we need to make more and more contacts as quickly as possible – whoever has the most friends wins the race. But that is complete nonsense. The good old saying that less is more is especially true for networking

No, not at all! It is not the quantity that matters. Otherwise India with its 1.2 billion inhabitants would be more successful than Germany with its 80 million. But although we don’t even have 8% of India’s population, we generate twice as much as the Indians. And the gross domestic product per capita is even ten times as high as there. So size does not matter after all.

It all depends on how they want to live their lives. But to answer you: do you know the Dunbar number?

Robin Dunbar is a British scientist. He found that we have spent much of our modern evolutionary development in communities of 150 people or less. The first villages we lived in from 6000 B.C. had between 120 and 150 inhabitants. Dunbar compared this to the numbers of British villages in the Middle Ages. Here, too, the 150 appears again and again. Today we know that organizations up to the number of 150 can still be managed without large hierarchies, because the members can still be in common, personal relationships with each other. The Roman Empire built on its legions. The legions in turn were built on the manipulators. One Manipel consisted of 150 people with support personnel. To make a long story short: Your network should not have more than 150 contacts. But these should be resilient relationships.