Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

by David Burkus

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Find Strength in Weak Ties

  See Your Whole Network

  Become a Broker and Fill Structural Holes

  Seek Out Silos

  Build Teams from All over Your Network

  Become a Super-Connector

  Leverage Preferential Attachment

  Create the Illusion of Majority

  Resist Homophily

  Skip Mixers—Share Activities Instead

  Build Stronger Ties Through Multiplexity

  Conclusion

  Going Further

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Sample Chapter from UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by David Burkus

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Burkus, David, (date) author.

  Title: Friend of a friend . . . : understanding the hidden networks that can transform your life and your career / David Burkus.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017056986 (print) | LCCN 2017045593 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544971288 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544971264 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Business networks. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/ Careers / General. Classification: LCC HD69.S8 (print) | LCC HD69.S8 B8587 2018 (ebook) | DDC 650.1/3—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056986

  Cover design by Timothy Goodman

  Author photograph © Daniel Folkers

  v1.0418

  To my parents

  Introduction

  Or

  How I Learned to Stop Networking and Love Network Science

  IN 1999, A YOUNG COMPUTER ENGINEER and aspiring entrepreneur named Adam Rifkin was looking for advice on his next move. In gathering advice, Rifkin sent an unsolicited email to a man he had never met in person named Graham Spencer. At the time, Spencer was one of the hottest names in the Silicon Valley tech community, having just completed the sale of his last start-up, Excite.com.1

  Although Excite.com is still active, it’s easy to forgive anyone who doesn’t immediately recognize the name. In the age before Google and Facebook, however, Excite was one of the biggest brands on the Internet. Started in 1993 by Spencer and five of his friends, Excite had grown to become the front page of the Internet for a significant percentage of web-surfers. (This was back when people still used that term seriously.) Spencer and the Excite team had grown the website from a humble start-up to a vast collection of websites. They had some financial struggles, but the success of the website in drawing users eventually led them to a major payout. In early 1999, Excite was sold to the telecommunications company @Home for $6.7 billion. Needless to say, once the deal was finalized, Spencer was getting a lot of attention.

  That Rifkin sent a cold email hoping for some advice from a Silicon Valley success story isn’t unusual; who wouldn’t at least try? What is unusual is that Spencer agreed to the request. Not only did Spencer volunteer to meet with Rifkin in person and answer any questions Rifkin had, but he went above and beyond that. Once Rifkin had explained his idea, Spencer connected Rifkin to a venture capitalist who became one of the first funders of the new start-up.

  The overriding question is why, at the height of his popularity, and at the peak of the demand for his time, did Spencer agree to sit down with someone he had never met in person?

  Because five years earlier, Rifkin and Spencer had built a webpage about punk rock bands.

  More specifically, in 1994, as Rifkin was beginning his studies in computer science, he built a fan website dedicated to the emerging punk rock band Green Day. Despite it being the early days of the Internet, the website took off quickly. In fact, the website was getting so much attention that members of Green Day asked if they could take it over from Rifkin and make it their official website. Rifkin said yes. But Rifkin also received another request, from a young Graham Spencer, who felt that labeling Green Day as “punk rock” was taking attention away from “real” punk bands. So Rifkin and Spencer worked together and built a page on the Green Day website that listed other, lesser known bands. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to re-engaging with him over e-mails in 1999,” Rifkin said. “Which led to my company getting founded in 2000.”2 Rifkin had helped Spencer, even though he could have ignored the request. Five years later, Spencer in turn helped Rifkin even though he too could have ignored the request.

  While this story might seem exceptional, it’s actually not that uncommon an occurrence for Rifkin. His career has been full of incidents of helping individuals who either were or would go on to be well-known figures in technology and business. Like the time Rifkin gave some contract work over to a young Ev Williams so he could keep afloat with a start-up called Blogger—which he later sold to Google for an undisclosed sum (though rumors estimate tens of millions). Williams would go on to start the company that would become Twitter. Or like the time Rifkin was starting another company and needed office space, and Reid Hoffman offered to let his team crash at LinkedIn until they got on their feet.3

  Rifkin’s story is filled with amazing anecdotes. He may not be a well-known name to everyone, but to the right people in his industry, he’s more than well known. He’s the best networker in the world. Literally. In 2011, Fortune magazine named Rifkin “the world’s best networker”—since it turned out that he was more connected than anyone else to the most influential people on Fortune’s lists (Fortune 500, 40 Under 40, 50 Most Powerful Women, etc.).4

  What is surprising about Rifkin earning this title isn’t just that he is not the household name we would expect, but also that he doesn’t fit the image of the world’s best networker. He is not a tall, extroverted, dapper, energetic, eloquent, highly educated professional. “I am not an extrovert,” he has said frequently. “Meeting people is not my favorite thing.”5 He describes himself as a little shy and awkward. He prefers a T-shirt and hoodie to a suit and tie. His look is often compared to a panda bear (a comparison he wears fairly proudly). He’d rather reconnect with old friends than work a room full of new people.

  What Rifkin does have is an understanding of how networks work. Much of his initial strategy for building relationships and making connections wasn’t gleaned from an advice book about being a power networker. It came from his graduate school work in computer science. “I feel fortunate to have learned networking from many excellent teachers,” Rifkin once said. “And the greatest of these teachers was actually the Internet itself.”6 To Rifkin, human networks follow similar principles to computer networks. And studying those networks taught him several lessons about how to build and utilize better human networks. While we might think of our network as a collection of contact cards in a Rolodex (or more modernly, a collection of names in a contacts app), when Rifkin thought about networks, he saw them not as a collection of contacts but as the map
of the connections between contacts. “A network is basically a set of people and the connections between those people,” he explained.7

  One lesson in particular was that computer networks grow in value as the number of nodes and the number of connections grow. (A similar lesson from network science, often referred to as Metcalfe’s Law, is a mathematical expression of this idea.) “If you go about it the right way, then it’s good for everyone,” Rifkin explained. “If you go about it the wrong way, then it cuts off opportunities, not just for yourself but for others too.”8 So Rifkin committed himself to making introductions every single day. Eventually, he learned to scale his network building by building a whole community, 106 Miles, dedicated to keeping the tech community well connected. Today, 106 Miles has almost 10,000 members who interact regularly. It’s a network unto itself. Although Rifkin isn’t at the center of it anymore, it owes its existence to his perspective on networks and networking.

  Rifkin’s own extensive network, and the career success it has brought him, is more than an amazing story. It’s a stern rejection of many of the misconceptions about what networking is and how it’s supposed to work. One reason these misconceptions are widespread is that the majority of books, workshops, courses, speeches, and more on the subject are based on old and misguided advice. Specifically:

  They say you should write and refine your “elevator pitch.”

  They say you should never eat a meal alone.

  They say that you should repeat someone’s name three times in the first few seconds of conversation (sometimes as advice for remembering the name, other times as a trick to get people to like you more).

  They will offer guidelines on how to work a room or how to meet new connections online.

  But all advice is autobiographical.9 Advice, even advice about networks, represents little more than one person’s single story projected onto others. Advice, at its core, says, “I did this and it worked, so you should do it too,” or the slightly more convincing, “I wasn’t doing this, but then I did and it changed my life.” As well meaning, inspirational, and accurate as another person’s autobiography might be, it’s still one person, with one specific set of skills, one personality, in one specific location, at one specific time. So what if you’re not that person with that personality at that point in life? What if you’re not the tall, extroverted, dapper, energetic, eloquent, highly educated professional who’s giving you the advice? Would it still work for you? Would you even want to try it?

  Many people report feeling sketchy or even dirty when they engage in or think about networking. We think about the creepy salesman at the last networking mixer we attended, the one who sped around the room handing out business cards like candy and always scanning for people more “important” than us to talk to. Or we think about that old classmate who just hit the job market unexpectedly and has started frantically emailing everyone in her address book, blanketing LinkedIn with connection requests, and asking just about everyone out for coffee and a “quick chat.” Networking seems to many of us to be an insincere way to manipulate relationships for personal gain. This is the repulsive stereotype most people have of networkers, and it’s no surprise that it is not a pleasant picture.

  In one study, the researchers Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki found that even just thinking about networking leaves most people feeling dirty . . . literally dirty.10 In one round of the study, the researchers asked 306 adults to remember a time when they reached out to form a new relationship. One group was asked to imagine a time when they sought out professional contacts who could help their career (what the researchers called “instrumental networking”). Another group was asked to imagine a time when they reached out to someone in their industry to form a personal connection, without consideration of professional gain (what the researchers called “personal networking” but we could also label “being a decent human being”).

  Afterwards, participants in both groups were asked to perform a word completion task and given word fragments (such as “S _ _ P” or “W _ _ H”) that could be filled in to spell seemingly random words (“STEP” or “WISH”) or words related to cleanliness (“SOAP” or “WASH”). It has been well demonstrated in previous research that feeling morally tainted increases our desire for cleanliness and that desire manifests in subtle shifts in cognition—including how we do a word completion task. Unsurprisingly, Casciaro and her colleagues found that those in the instrumental networking group—those who had to imagine a time when they played the role of the stereotypical networker—completed the task with words related to cleanliness. The implication is that the act of networking made them feel morally tainted and literally dirty.

  In a follow-up round, the researchers took the experiment online. They asked students to think of a time when they had reached out to get to know someone better. One group of students was asked about social connections and the other about professional relationships. The researchers then asked the social group to reach out to the person they were thinking of via Facebook (a social media website mainly used to build and maintain friendships), and the professional group was asked to reach out to the person they had remembered via LinkedIn (a social media website mainly used to build and maintain professional relationships). Afterwards, all students were surveyed about how they were feeling. Again, the professional relationships group reported feeling physically dirtier than those in the social relationships group.

  Despite these results, Casciaro and her colleagues also found that networking was hugely important. In a different study, they surveyed hundreds of lawyers throughout North America and asked them how frequently they engaged in networking. They found that those who engaged in making new connections and strengthening old ones were better performers (in terms of billable hours and hence compensation) than those who didn’t. Their findings align with a significant body of research that demonstrates that networking—making and strengthening connections to others—is vitally important for professional success. Likewise, understanding how the networks inside an organization truly operate dramatically improves its overall importance.

  But what do you get when you combine an understanding that networks and relationships are important with the commonly shared belief that networking activities are awkward and dirty? You get perhaps the most commonly expressed maxim about networking: “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”

  This phrase is a curious one. People have written it down or spoken it aloud for at least seven decades (and probably more than that),11 but usually just to express exasperation. “I didn’t get the job [the sale/the promotion] because I didn’t have the right connections.” You may have even said it yourself at some point—in a moment of similar frustration. If success is mostly a matter of who you know, then we start to believe that we only have two choices: settle for less, or adopt the stereotypical networking prowler.

  But what if there is another choice?

  In fact, there is.

  Researchers Rob Cross and Robert Thomas have found time and again that “who you know” is important, but just knowing lots of people won’t get you there. “In fact, we’ve found that individuals who simply know a lot of people are less likely to achieve standout performance,” they write. “Political animals with lots of connections to corporate and industry leaders don’t win the day, either.”12 Collecting contacts isn’t the surefire route to success.

  In light of this research showing that it’s not necessarily about who you know, perhaps another commonly used phrase is more accurate: it’s about knowing who is a “friend of a friend.” It’s about getting a full picture of the network you already have access to, and learning how to improve it.

  Like Adam Rifkin, understanding how networks work, how to navigate them, and how to tend to the community they represent is what determines a lot of your career success and a lot of organizations’ ability to perform. Knowing who your friends are and who their friends are, so you can gain a better understanding of th
e community, will lead to better odds that your network will enhance your success.

  Fortunately, this insight is backed up by decades of research from the worlds of sociology and network science. This research supports that being connected to a strong network provides major advantages—access to diverse skills and perspectives, the ability to learn private information, and the type of expertise and influence that makes it easier to attain power—which sociologists refer to as social capital. An intriguing term that appears to have been invented by six different people at six different times, social capital takes its definition opposite physical capital—financial resources, inventory, property, and the like.13 Just as those things have value, sociologists argue, so do the connections and networks of our social capital—especially when we know how to leverage that capital. In one study, led by the renowned sociologist Ronald Burt (more on him soon), it was found that educating executives about network structures and principles led to dramatic improvements in performance.14 Those who took the training were 36 to 42 percent more likely to improve their performance than similarly qualified but untrained peers, and 42 to 74 percent more likely to be promoted.

  And that is what this book is about.

  This isn’t just a book about networking. It’s not like any networking book you have read (or ignored) before. This is a book about how networks actually work. This isn’t another collection of rote advice and specific instructions on how to meet new people or how to work a room. It’s not a manual for managing your social media and online presence. There are plenty of those guides already and adding one more wouldn’t help—especially because just collecting contacts doesn’t work. Instead, this is a book that takes a deep dive into the proven science of networks and shares the implications for anyone looking to upgrade their connections and relationships.