Caring / Competency / Competition

The orange circle represents the circle of friends that we trust. Specifically, we trust that our friends will never HARM us. Whether they can help us professionally or in business is a different matter. The focus is on emotional information-sharing. ("How's Teresa? How are the kids? Did you recover from that ski accident?")

The green circle represents the professional or business contacts, with whom we work or share knowledge in order to mutually increase our respective competencies or market value. The focus is on intellectual information-sharing. ("Did you hear about the Ajax trend? What do you think of RSS and Web 2.0?")

The red circle represents the competitive arena in which we compete.

As you can see, because the red circle is growing rapidly (due to competition from other industries, from automation, from developing countries, etc.), there is a need to grow the green circle by multiply connections through which we can actually learn professionally useful skills and competencies.