Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it. - Reid Hoffman

Ideally, most of the top executives of a company should be on Foundational tours.

As with her previous tours, the process of defining the tour was a collaboration between Gultekin and her manager. “Dan always asks, ‘What do you want to do in five years?’ and we work backwards from there,” Gultekin told us. “I want to be a general manager, so we decided that I needed to add sales to my toolkit. I had never done sales in my life but he knew that my fresh perspective could be useful.” Notice how the mission had to serve the needs of both the employee and the business; Gultekin and LinkedIn have a strong alliance because they have the mutual trust to commit to a mutual investment (shifting to sales) that will provide mutual benefit (a more well-rounded skill set for Gultekin, and a fresh perspective for LinkedIn).

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.