May 2005
This article is about about personal social capital and networking from a perspective that you have probably not heard before.
First we will look at what it is, then why it is valuable and finally, what you need to do to get the value.
We all live in a web of relationships and the people we know tend to cluster into groups. We have our families, the people we work with, or people who share our hobbies or other passions. Many people go to a church and know people in that context. If you visualize the relationships you can imagine a network, so we call it a network.
It is a network where you are the person that is linking together these diverse groups. Your mom may not know all the people you work with, the people you work with may not share your hobbies, but you are a member of all of the groups.
The world is filled with groups of people who interact mostly with each other.If you imagine the network of the whole world it will be clumps of people connected by some people that know people in both clumps.
Each person can be a door into another world. A social network is a network of relationships like: ãtalks to each other.ä The clumping is because people generally need a reason to talk to each other, they are in the same field, the same grade in school or so on. Each of the clumps are networks too, subnetworks , so each person is part of many social networks.
For example, when you were in school you probably knew many people in your class, but few in other classes. The few that you did know were links into the other class. If you wanted information about the other class, about a member of the class, a teacher, a course or whatever, you could ask your acquaintance in the other class and they would likely know because of their relationship with the members of their class.
There are countless situations like this. You know someone that works somewhere you might want to work÷they are a link into a potential job. When you ask a computer geek how to solve a problem with your computer÷they are part of a group that talks about and thinks about computers a lot. In fact, even talking to a doctor is more than just accessing his or her knowledge. He or she is a link into a community that works with and thinks about medicine many hours a week. Every time you go to specialists you are not just getting their expertise, but the expertise of everyone in the field they work with.
This is the key to ãnetworking.ä Networking is actively seeking something through social networks. There are many books and courses about it. The books and classes use the same basic logic. Since people tend to clump into groups. Within groups, the same information is recycled. So if you are looking for a job or trying to sell something the best thing to do is to meet random people in various situations and ask them if they know of anyone with a job offer or a something they want to buy or sell.
There is more to networking than what the books tell you, as we will see, but these books sell because it often works, people who network do better at sales or finding jobs than people who don't.
The reason for this was first explained in a paper called ãThe Strength of Weak Tiesä by Mark Granovetter . Granovetter is a sociologist and at the time he was investigating how people get jobs. While interviewing hundreds of professionals in the US he kept hearing a pattern. When he asked if they found the job through a friend, they would say ãno, not really a friend, just someone I knew.ä Granovetter realized that people that get new information, an apartment, a job, or whatever, most often get it from people they do not know that well. This is because the people we know well often know much the same things we do because we talk to them often and have a similar set of relationships.
Since Granovetter published his paper in 1974, there has been considerable expansion in the study of social networks. The field existed decades before Granovetter's paper but his paper was written at a time when interest was growing and it has been growing ever since. In the last 10 years it has started growing even faster because now there is software that is readily available to study them.
The rules for hiring people are different in different countries and the way tradespeople find jobs is different than professionals, but the underlying observation of people clumping together has held and Granovetter's observation has stood the test of time. It makes sense that it would.
Who do you choose to be around? Who are you around because of external circumstances? You did not choose your family, but you most likely have a lot in common with them in many ways. This is because of their influence on you when growing up. You probably don't choose all of the people you work with. On the other hand, many people in the developed world choose their professions and try to be in a work environment where they feel comfortable. We usually try to be around people with whom we feel comfortable and we feel most comfortable with people who know and do the same things we do.
There is certainly nothing wrong with that. However, students of social networks have discovered an interesting fact. Many of the things we value as humans come from bridging the gaps between worlds. For instance, entrepreneurs can be thought of as people who find a group that needs something and another that has it and brokers between them. The people in a company that can talk to both engineers and marketing are translators and are valuable. But perhaps the most valuable thing of all is innovation.
It turns out that innovations are rarely, if ever, the consequence of a lone genius, but are from people seeing ideas in one social world and applying them to another. For instance, Ford did not invent the assembly iine , he borrowed the idea from the meat packing industry. As one of his team members said: ãif they can use assembly lines to take apart pigs and chickens, we can use them to put together cars.ä
When you consider that people who bridge social worlds, people who go outside of their comfort zone and make relationships in multiple social networks, are the entrepreneurs, the translators, the innovators and more, then it is no surprise that they get paid more, they get promoted faster and they get fewer colds.
Well, the last one may be a surprise, but the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a study in Volume 277(24) 25 June 1997 on pp 1940-1944. The study carefully eliminated other possible explainations and showed that people with the lowest network diversity got colds at 4 times the rate of those with the highest.
So, what does ãdiverseä mean? In the JAMA study it was people who have social contacts with schoolmates, family, volunteer organizations, religious organizations and others. Diverse can also mean diverse in professions, ethnic or cultural background, age, gender, education and other things that create social distance. We tend to feel most comfortable with people our own age, education and occupation. So basically diverse can mean ãpeople who don't know each otherä or ãdifferent from each otherä (which, in most cases, will mean they do not know each other).
The cold thing is a little difficult to figure out, but the idea that it is valuable to know people in different social worlds makes a lot of sense.
Knowing who to ask a question can be useful and the more different kinds of people you know, the more questions you can get answered. Interacting with people in different social networks and learning what they do and think gives us resources. Like traveling or reading, it exposes us to new ideas and new ways of thinking, so it is not hard to see how it can make us more innovative.
Consider the opposite, a people who are limited with who they interact with. What winds up happening is that ideas get recycled and people become fixed not only in what they think, but who they are.
Part of how we know who we are is what other people tell us and by comparing ourselves to others. We are all complex with many facets and huge potential. Our ideas of how to act and what we can be or do do not just spring up from nowhere. If one has a small set of people to model, it is difficult to even imagine being or doing anything else.
Once I heard a young man talk. He was from a US inner city where gangs were common. He went to a summer camp where he learned about business. For the first time in his life he was hearing about loans, equity, financial reports, and marketing programs. He said he did not understand what he was hearing, but it made him aware that there were different things he could be and different worlds he could live in. No one in his network talked or knew about these things. The consequence was that he started his own business and is doing well and many of his friends from childhood are dead or in jail.
So, while having friends that we feel comfortable with is a great part of life, meeting people that do things we do not understand who live in worlds we did not know existed can be even more valuable.
Many people look at ãnetworkingä as a way to get something. They say: ãif I can't get something from it, what's the point?ä When they say that they are usually defining ãsomethingä in very narrow terms. They are talking about making a sale or getting a job. It is possible to make sales or get jobs through social networks, but going to a party and collecting business cards is not building a social network. If one does not have a network when he or she needs a job or needs to make a sale, it is already too late.
Networks are not something that one goes out and develops when he or she needs something. They are something that one builds up over a lifetime. They exist everywhere, but one needs to be part of them for them to have value.
Often I hear business people say things like ãmy business is embedded software, I don't have time to learn about biotech.ä Which is fine on one level, but it is sort of like Web designers whose main networking is going to Web design conventions. They get to meet all the people that are doing the same thing as them. If they went to a tool and die convention, they would be able to think of ways to apply Web design to a different industry and would have potential new customers. The fact is that the way that biotech and embedded software companies think about goals, financing and business models are different and each can provide ideas to the other.
I have seen many hundreds of companies give pitches to angel investors and over the years have been approached by many more. Very few of them will ever get funding. Often I recommend to them to go to different business forums and even spend some time volunteering for their community. They almost always act like my advice is borderline insane. They contact angel groups and venture capital firms and polish their PowerPoint presentation and give it whenever possible until they run out of money and have to go back to their day jobs.
Once Suhas Patil , one of the most successful entrepreneurs Silicon Valley has ever produced, said to talk about your ideas with everyone, you do not know where you will make the contact, ãit could be in a laundromat .ä Who is going to use a product? Not an abstract customer, but real flesh and blood people just like people you see every day. Who would support a business financially? Not some abstract VC fund, but a human being. The same applies to art or music as well as business.
If one accepts it that having diverse social networks can be an advantage in life in many ways and it is worthwhile, then it is worthwhile to think a little about how to go about it.
One part of building networks is simple. For every person you meet, rich or poor, young or old, male or female, every race and profession, make it a habit to try and understand what they do, something that they do that makes them feel like they have accomplished something special, and how you might be able to help them. The easiest and most common way you will find you can help people is by introducing them to someone that can help them.
For many people, this advice seems absurd. They think ãI am networking for my advantage, I don't have time to run around trying to help everyone I meet.ä But if you think about it, how do you feel about people who only ask you for things and never give anything in return? How do you feel about someone that takes an interest in what you do and tries to help you?
You invest in your relationships, the same way you would invest in a bank account. Some people call the history of relationships one develops ãsocial capital.ä
What you need to do is to have the mind set of an explorer, like in Star Trek where people explore and discover things because that is what they do. Many people shop and know where they can locate anything they need. Building a social network is like that, browsing around the worlds of others and seeing what's there, so when you need it, you will know where to find it. Not only that, when you meet new people and want to enhance your own network by helping others, you will know people to introduce them to. That is why it is "capital," it is like a bank account from which you can withdraw when you need it.
But more than that, there is the unexpected. We know what we know and we tend to look for what we know. Putting ourselves into places where we don't know what to expect not only exposes us to new possibilities, but it trains our brains to notice and integrate the unexpected. That is the core of why innovation and so many positive things flow out of the experience.
Not knowing what is going to happen can be discomforting, but people seek it out by reading novels, going to movies and so on. Going into a situation where you do not understand what people are talking about can be interpreted as unpleasant. It can also be interpreted as a puzzle, a challenge. Like anything, if you do it for a while, it gets easier.
Once you have decided to seek out new life and new civilizations, so to speak , and you have your prime directive of trying to understand and help everyone you meet. The last step is figure out where to go.
There is a huge world you are not participating in, and most of it might be more fun that you think. Newspapers carry calendars of meetings and other events. Volunteer to work for an organization that educates people, saves trees, promotes world understanding or whatever. There are thousands of such organizations. Visit professional association meetings of different professions that yours. Go to school, learn a new language, take music lessons and join a band.
There is never a down side to knowing more about what other people do.
In some parts of the world, people are born, live and die in small social groups. Change happens slowly. But in the developed world today change is happening rapidly. Many have an instinct to go back to the past, the small stable social group. But, while our involvement in many social networks presents a challenge, it is also an opportunity: An opportunity to open countless doors and partake in the treasures that lay behind them.
Don Steiny is president of Institute for Social Network Analysis of the Economy (ISNAE)
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