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

by David Burkus

  The birthday pledges also morphed as word of charity: water spread. As fund-raisers reached out to their weak ties, these people learned about charity: water and developed their own unique ideas. One person climbed a mountain to raise money; another swam the English Channel.41 Donors saw every detail of these ventures—the total amount raised and later the project that was funded, along with photos and GPS coordinates. The innovation and transparency that charity: water had brought to the philanthropic world was immense, and it likely wouldn’t have happened if Scott Harrison hadn’t been forced to reach back to his former life and his dormant ties. While few folks from the nightclub world are still actively involved in charity: water (Harrison believes the tech industry is now their biggest influence and champion), the path Harrison traveled down would have looked a lot different if it weren’t for those original weak ties.

  The chances of unlocking value from only your immediate and close connections are minimal, since your close contacts don’t have access to a lot of information you don’t already have yourself. But the lessons of weak ties research, as evidenced by the experiences of White and the Fertittas, as well as Scott Harrison and charity: water, suggest that you may be missing out on a major asset: those weak ties you may have forgotten about or haven’t reconnected with in a while. It’s those weak ties that give you the best chance of finding new information and learning about unexpected opportunities. Moreover, weak and dormant ties are likely to be much more plentiful in your network than your strong connections. If you want to maximize the value of your network, then you need to make sure you’re using all of your connections and not limiting yourself to just your current strong ties. The bottom line is that when it comes to new information and opportunities, your weak and dormant ties are much stronger.

  From Science to Practice

  The biggest implication of the strength of weak and dormant ties is that we ought to fight our impulses. When we have a career setback, for example, we tend to tell only a close circle of friends who may or may not be able to help (most likely not), and then we take to blindly responding to job postings online or calling headhunters. Instead, we ought to go to our weak and dormant ties, tell them our story, and see what opportunities they can steer us toward.

  Even better is to start a regular practice of reengaging with your weak and dormant ties. So here’s a weekly routine to get you started:

  Like the executives studied, list six to ten work colleagues with whom you used to have a strong relationship but who have since fallen by the wayside—include, at a minimum, those colleagues with whom you haven’t had an in-depth conversation in two years.

  Randomly select one person from the list. Roll dice or flip a coin if you have to, then email or call with an invitation to chat in person or via phone call.

  Don’t set an agenda. Don’t say you are looking for something specific. Just say you would like to reconnect. During a free-flowing conversation, however, you are likely to talk about work matters, problems, opportunities, etc. Make a note of these and follow up anywhere you could help or might need help.

  Practicing Online

  Whether you consider yourself a technology Luddite and don’t have a social media profile on websites like Facebook or Linked‑In or you’ve grown up alongside a digital presence, you are in luck. Most of these services have an option to import your email or smartphone’s address book and send invitations to connect to anyone who is a match. If you have old contacts in there, then the service will automatically do step 1 and step 2 for you. It’s still on you, however, to be brave and send the invitation to chat; the technology for that isn’t quite here yet.

  For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.

  —2—

  See Your Whole Network

  Or

  Why It Really Is a Small World After All

  We often think of networks as just a collection of connections we have—big or small, good or bad—and tend to sort these folks by their usefulness to the situation at hand. However, research shows that we are all so closely connected that this is a bad way to frame our networks. The truth is that we are all one big network, and the people who succeed are not the ones with the best collection but the ones who can see and navigate their network best.

  IN 1994, THREE POSSIBLY INEBRIATED fraternity brothers changed our understanding of human connection.

  That might be a stretch, but it’s not far off. The three men, Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli, all students at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, were watching movies together and started to wonder why Kevin Bacon appeared to be in so many different movies.1 That very day, they had watched multiple movies in succession, and all of them had an appearance by Bacon. They began to speculate that perhaps Bacon was the center of the Hollywood universe. Indeed, this was the beginning of the Kevin Bacon network, or as it’s known, “six degrees of Kevin Bacon.” (As we’ll find out, the name is derived from a well-known phenomenon called “six degrees of separation.”)

  To test their theory, they began to play a game. Being movie buffs, they started to name random actors and actresses and see how many steps it took to connect those people back to Kevin Bacon through movies. For example, Elvis Presley is connected to Kevin Bacon by just one intermediary. Presley was in King Creole with Walter Matthau, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon.2 The trio gave Presley a “Bacon number” of 2. Tom Cruise’s Bacon number is 1; that’s because he acted in A Few Good Men with Bacon. Even actors from long ago can connect to Bacon with relative ease. Marilyn Monroe has a Bacon number of just 2. (Monroe acted in The Misfits with Kevin McCarthy, who acted in Hero at Large with Kevin Bacon.)

  Convinced they had stumbled upon a discovery of earth-shattering proportions, the frat brothers sent off a letter to The Jon Stewart Show, a late-night show on MTV popular with college students. Their letter was short but to the point: “We are three men on a mission. Our mission is to prove to the Jon Stewart audience, nay, the world, that Bacon is God.”3 Shockingly, their letter worked. They were invited to come on the show and to demonstrate their expertise by connecting Kevin Bacon to actors named at random. They also got the chance to meet Bacon himself on the show and earn their own Bacon number of sorts. Their appearance on the show made an impact and the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” spread rapidly. For their efforts, the frat brothers even landed a book deal.

  More interestingly, the television show was watched by two computer science students at the University of Virginia who took the game to another level. Glen Watson and Brett Tjaden happened to be watching that fateful episode and decided that determining the number of connections between two actors might be a viable project for their studies, if only they could find the data.4 Luckily, another computer programmer had already compiled that data a few years before when he launched the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb. That website featured information about almost every movie ever released, including everyone who worked on the film as a director, writer, producer, or actor.

  It was the precise data Watson and Tjaden needed. After only a few weeks of programming and refining, they launched The Oracle of Bacon, a website where anyone can enter the names of any two movie stars and in seconds the program will find the shortest distance between them. (While the website will enter “Kevin Bacon” as a default, you can delete his name and replace it to find the connection between two non-Bacon stars.) Fueled by the popularity of the game, and offering the chance to referee debates between players, the website quickly took off. At its high point, it was receiving 20,000 visits per day. And it was also inspiring copycat games. “Six Degrees of Marlon Brando” became a fad in Germany. And in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the New York Times even printed a diagram called “Six Degrees of Monica” connecting her to famous (and infamous) people like Bill Clinton (obviously), O. J. Simpson, and even Kevin Bacon. (Currently, the website is run by a different program
mer, Patrick Reynolds, who rebuilt it in 1999.) In 2007, inspired by his six degrees fame, Bacon himself established a charitable organization to pair celebrities with local, less well-known charities in need of help raising awareness for their cause.5

  While Kevin Bacon is undoubtedly the best-known person to have a numbers game revolve around him, he actually isn’t the first. That title belongs to Paul Erdős, a mathematician famous for not just his productivity (more than 1,500 published papers) but his frequent collaborations (more than 500 collaborators).6 Mathematicians today make a game of how close they are to Erdős through publications. Those original 500 collaborators have an Erdős number of 1, those with whom they collaborated have a number of 2 (unless they also collaborated directly with Erdős). The American Mathematical Society even maintains its own version of the Oracle of Bacon website for Erdős, a “collaboration distance” calculator that can link any two mathematicians.7 The tool includes a special button that uses “Erdős” in place of a second name. Interestingly, Paul Erdős currently has a Bacon number of 3, having played himself in the documentary N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős (which also featured Ronald Graham, who was in Director’s Cut with Dave Johnson, who was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon).

  The explanation for why such games work goes back even further than Paul Erdős and reveals something much bigger about the nature of human connection. The Bacon and Erdős numbers work because their respective industries are relatively small, but the entire world, as the social psychologist Stanley Milgram first theorized, works a bit like the Oracle of Kevin Bacon and we are all connected to each other by just a few short links.

  Six Degrees of Everyone

  Stanley Milgram was a professor at Harvard University with a reputation for designing genius, but controversial, experiments in human behavior and interpersonal relations. Before coming to Harvard, Milgram had conducted a study at Yale that tested the limits of individuals’ willingness to obey authority, even when doing so seemed to cause harm to another human. This “obedience to authority” study became so famous that it’s often referred to as the “Milgram experiment.”8 But his follow-up work may have been even more influential.

  An avid traveler, Milgram would visit far-off lands like Madagascar or Pago Pago.9 Wherever he went, he liked to play a peculiar game. He would find a complete stranger, usually someone local to the area, and introduce himself. Then he would set about trading contacts with that stranger to see if by chance they happened to have any friends in common. It was this little game that inspired Milgram and his student Jeffrey Travers to investigate just how connected we all are.

  To start their experiment, Milgram and Travers first chose a target individual, a stockbroker working in Boston who was living in nearby Sharon, Massachusetts.10 Then they picked as far off a location as they could think of. To Milgram, a New Yorker living in Boston, the choice of Omaha, Nebraska,11 seemed most appropriate because, as he wrote, it appeared “vaguely ‘out there’ on the Great Plains or somewhere.”12 With the city chosen, the two psychologists went about recruiting participants.

  In total, Milgram and Travers solicited 296 volunteers. From that group, around one-third were randomly chosen from the Omaha population. Another third were from Omaha, but were chosen from a list of blue-chip stockholders (who were presumably more likely to find a connection to a Boston-based stockbroker). The final third were actually from Boston (again presumably, to provide an easier route to their target individual and hence act as a sort of control group). These individuals, regardless of which of the three groups their names were drawn from, would be the starting link in a chain of connections that might lead back to the Boston stockbroker.

  Every participant then received an official-looking booklet in the mail, emblazoned with the Harvard University logo.13 This “passport”—as the experimenters called it—included instructions on how to get it to the target stockbroker as well as how to keep track of where it was sent. If participants knew the target directly, they were free to send the booklet to him. If they didn’t, then they were instructed to send it to someone they knew on a first-name basis who would stand a better chance of getting the booklet to the target. They could send it to a friend living in Massachusetts, or to a local contact working in finance, or to anyone else they decided would be the best person to help the passport find its home. Included in each packet was a set of “tracer” cards, small preaddressed postcards to be sent back to Travers and Milgram so that they could also keep track of which participants had forwarded the passports.

  Within only a few days, passports started arriving at the stockbroker’s office.14 The first had made it to Boston with only two intermediate connections. In total, of the 296 passports sent out, 64 of them reached their target.15 Among all 64 passports that arrived, the average chain of connections was 5.2 people in length. Even for the Nebraska groups, the mean length was 5.5. (These are the averages of all passports that reached the target, hence the decimals. It’s probably better to think of it as five to six people in length.) There was no significant difference between being actively invested in stocks and being chosen at random. Rounding up to avoid having half of a person, that is six people—six degrees of separation between randomly chosen people and a specified target living halfway across the country. Surprisingly, the small group of Boston-based participants fared only slightly better. While statistically significant, their chains were still 4.4 connections in length (or four to five people). One possible explanation is that a large portion of the passports that arrived were first sent to someone geographically much closer to the stockbroker, and from there the length of the chain was basically the same as those that had originated in Boston.

  While the first step in this experiment was certainly interesting, the penultimate one was even more so. Of the 64 letters that the stockbroker received, almost half were delivered by the same three people. In fact, 25 percent of them were delivered by just one person.

  Word of Travers and Milgram’s experiment spread quickly. In addition to publishing their findings in a peer-reviewed journal, Milgram also wrote about the experiment in the popular press magazine Psychology Today.16 To Milgram, the experiment explained why he was so often able to find a connection to complete strangers in even the most distant foreign lands he visited. His result suggested that we are all connected to each other, amazingly, by just a few introductions. But as stunning as these findings were, Travers and Milgram’s experiment could only reveal the short path. It couldn’t truly explain how these networks worked. However, three decades later, two scientists working at Cornell University would propose a model that could explain it all.

  In the late 1990s, Cornell University professor Steven Strogatz and doctoral student Duncan Watts were studying fireflies.17 Specifically, they were studying a unique breed of firefly in Papua New Guinea that could mysteriously sync its flashing with the flashing of the flies around it. From dusk to midnight, they would somehow fall in line with the flies around them until an entire light posse (the spectacularly accurate term for a group of fireflies) would flash in unison. Observers would note whole trees of flies flashing in unison. Watts and Strogatz wanted to know why. Inside the lab, however, they were stuck.

  One day, while pondering fireflies, Watts remembered something his father had once told him—that he and every other person was only six handshakes away from the president of the United States. While Milgram’s research had been published, Watts hadn’t yet encountered it, so the idea seemed a little far-fetched to him. But since it was no more difficult to believe than a tree’s worth of fireflies flashing in unison, he decided to look into it. He went to the library and found Milgram’s paper and also Granovetter’s work on the strength of weak ties. But that was about it. All of the other research he found was disappointing, and none of it offered any explanation. Wondering if maybe it could help with the firefly problem, Watts suggested that Strogatz join him in figuring out what was going on behind the scenes to explain our six degrees o
f separation from each other.

  Both researchers saw the dilemma as inherently a math problem, one that bore a striking similarity to graph theory (a subdomain of mathematics), but few mathematicians had even bothered to touch the problem. Watts and Strogatz decided to use graphs, diagrams, and math to solve it. To begin, they drew a perfectly ordered network—a series of dots along a circle where each dot was connected only to its closest neighbors.18 Sending a message or introducing two dots to each other would take a long time if conducted by going through each dot to arrive at the intended receiver. But when Watts and Strogatz started adding a few links across the circle randomly, something astounding happened. The communication chain shrunk exponentially even after just a few new connections were made. Using computer simulations, they started repeating the process for hundreds of new models. Each time they would start with an orderly network of a specific size and uniform connections, then add a few random connections that spanned the network and watch as the communication chain shrunk dramatically.