Mentor Me Meg!

In today's connected world where everyone is just a few degrees away from everyone else, how difficult do you think it would be to reach out to the person of your choice and ask them to become your mentor? If the CEO & President of a niche HR software company in Honolulu wanted to have, for example, Meg Whitman as her mentor, would she be able to connect with her? That is exactly what I aim to find out.

I am calling this quest the Mentor-Me-Meg Mission and it starts today July 11, 2007. I don't know Meg Whitman and I don't think I know anyone who knows Meg Whitman. Therefore I will try a variety of strategies both high tech and low to see if I can make her acquaintance. We will see which, if any, of the strategies work.

Here is what I will try:

- Blog about it!
- Write and send a letter through postal mail to Meg at Ebay
- Email my network of influential people and see if any of them can connect me
- Call Ebay headquarters and ask to speak directly with Meg
- Use LinkedIn to see if I can connect through my connections
- Search on the Internet for Meg's email address and send her an email
- Search through off-line business directories for Meg's email and send her an email
- Contact Journalists about my mission and see if the publicity invokes Meg to contact me
- And if nothing else works, I will create a video on the mission and post on YouTube (Please help me connect with her first so I don't have to do this one.)

You can join me in the Mentor-Me-Meg mission and read along as I post the process and results of the various connection strategies. If nothing else, it should make for a fun anecdotal study on which methods are most effective. Any guesses on whether or not I will succeed and if so which will have been the winning strategy?

PS. If you know Meg Whitman or someone who knows Meg Whitman or you are Meg Whitman, please email me at bncarvin-at-nobscot-dot-com? Thanks!

Beth N. Carvin
CEO & President
Nobscot Corporation