Australia: Give a Girl a Fish...

"Give a girl a fish and she'll create a fabulous meal...teach her how to fish...and she'll teach all her friends to fish too!"

I'm not in the habit of quoting myself but the above line popped into to my head in an inspired moment...my inspiration was a chat that I had with incredibly successful entrepreneur and 'Dragon's Den' judge Suzi Dafnis from the Australian Businesswomen's Network. More about Suzi and the ABN in just a moment.

Since time began, women have been sharing their knowledge through the generations. Things is, we're no longer moving at a pace that we can rely on our elders to impart their knowledge on all things and still be fully equipped to deal with life as we know it. We need to seek teachers and mentors just to keep ourselves in the game - then, getting ahead of the game requires considerably more diligence on our part again. Truth be told, if you're not acquiring new skills and knowledge, you're no longer standing still - you're in fact going backwards.

If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Tipping Point' you'll be familiar with the term "maven". We all need to seek our "mavens" - the people on the cutting edge who seek the 'new', the 'innovative' and then make sure we're within the personal and professional networks of "connectors" to ensure we're enlightened with the information these "mavens" discover. It's also a good move to be within a community that contains several "salesmen" who can do the job of breaking the information down into a palatable and hopefully plain-English form so we don't have to spend our precious time deciphering all the jargon that our "mavens" use to describe the 'new' and 'innovative'. What's best is when you can find this all in the one place!

PINK is of course a place where this all takes place, but this being the Australia Blog - let me take a moment to show you what we Aussies are up to in the Innovation and Collaboration stakes - we might be Down Under but we're On Top when it comes to teaching our girls to fish - thanks to Suzi Dafnis and the ABN.

My chat with, Suzi Dafnis - Community Director of the Australian Businesswomen's Network

You might even recall Suzi's name from the more than 6 years she spent in the USA as COO of Rich Dad's Seminars, the company that presented events with Robert Kiyosaki, inspired by his books 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' and 'The Cashflow Quadrant' all across the USA. Currently, Suzi is Community Director of the Australian Businesswomen's Network (ABN) - providing education, mentoring, inspiration and networking to business women all over Australia. Suzi continues to spend some of her time each year in the USA, attending conferences, forums, Social Media related events and then presenting what she discovers to the businesswomen of Australia through the many activities of the ABN.

I asked Suzi if she saw herself as a conduit for all this new information we women need to make better use of the time and energy that goes into running our businesses and here's what she had to say.

"We ran live events once a month with the ABN for many years [but] we're a big country with a very sparse population, so it wasn't feasible to do that because we were never going to get to the back of Wagga to satisfy the women there...and its quite often those women in rural and country areas that don't get the same access to resources as women living in the cities"

This lead Suzi to explore other ways of communicating business education to the women of Australia. About the use of technology to reach women in a way that was practical she says  "the average working woman needs some flexibility, so now [through the ABN website] they can download a talk onto their iPod and listen to it while they're walking the dog."

But Suzi and the ABN haven't stopped there..."we've become bigger users of technology...to allow us to do things like run our National Mentoring Program which is all delivered online and is all based on Social Media platforms." The ABN also holds regular classes via the web with monthly webinars on difference business subjects, these are also available on demand for members to utilise at a convenient time for them.

They set out to be, as the accomplished entrepreneur says "the place to go for business education online for entrepreneurial woman" and it's pretty obvious with their reach into the Australian population of women in business that they're achieving that goal. The program that caught my attention on Facebook was their '30 Days of Social Media' a practical guide on how to effectively use these platforms for business. Suzi so right when she said "telling women to use facebook and twitter will make absolutely no difference unless we tell them why and show them how" and this sentiment is backed up by the ABN making a Free Ebook covering everything available to members at the end of the course.

Everyone that I meet who knows Suzi Dafnis tells me what a tireless advocate for Australian women in business she is and it's so great to see that she and the Australian Businesswomen's Network are making it possible for us all to stride forward with confidence. Her desire to learn from others, both here in Australia ('30 Days of Social Media' was a largely collaborative program between the ABN and it's members contributing their knowledge) and overseas and to share it all with the community has given many women a chance to explore what she calls "another avenue to get an even better result".

Lesley-Ann Trow is Founder of Gorgeous Things - the pink guide to being green and gorgeous