Then one of their casual salespeople, paid by commission only, learned that the firm needed money and introduced a venture capitalist acquaintance. Shortly after, Zip2 had millions of dollars of development funding, and the venture took off.
Kimbal Musk understood the moral of this story better than anyone: ‘Some of the people you think will not be able to help you in any way know people who can help you in ways you cannot believe.’14
Have you ever stopped to wonder how teenagers and even younger children all over the world somehow manage to gain access to the latest pop-culture knowledge, sexual lore and aggressive humour? Today’s easy answer is the Internet. But this happened before cyberspace even existed. Back in 1979, sociologists Gary Fine and Sherryl Kleinman found exactly the same phenomenon and asked how it was that huge numbers of children who’d never met each other gained a common set of attitudes and knowledge across the United States and the world. They found the answer in weak links:
[The] speed at which children’s lore is spread across great distances suggests the role of weak ties. In addition to the school peer group, children who have been geographically mobile may maintain friendships over many miles. The childhood pastime of having pen pals is an example…Likewise…distant cousins…can provide a mechanism by which cultural traditions breach geographical chasms.
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Clearly, in the Internet age, these weak links are even easier to forge–current obsessions spread almost instantly and youth culture everywhere has become more homogeneous. The same is true of ethnic, gay, feminist and many other subcultures.
Researchers have also found that weak ties exert more power than strong ties in the most unexpected places. Picture a kibbutz. You might expect the strong chain of command to exert greater influence than more informal and casual connections. Yet sociologist Gabriel Weimann found the reverse. He refuted the conventional view that discipline in a kibbutz is essentially a matter of strong ties, showing that weak ties were more important; and he discovered that widely shared gossip acted as a deterrent to maverick behaviour and was far more effective than face-to-face feedback.16
The theory of weak links can be traced back at least 160 years, to the Victorian intellectual John Stuart Mill. As quoted at the head of this chapter, he wrote in 1848 that it was immensely valuable for people to meet ‘persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar’. He was thinking primarily of contact with foreigners, arising from the dramatic increase in international trade the world was experiencing at the time he was writing. In fact, he greeted the expansion of trade with all the enthusiasm (and naivety) of contemporary advocates of globalisation:
Commerce is now what war once was, the principal source of this contact [with dissimilar people]. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests [what we call weak links and their benefits] which are in natural opposition to it…[The] rapid increase of international trade…[is] the principal guarantee of the peace of the world.
American sociologist Rose Coser, over a century later, developed Mill’s insight about the value of meeting diverse people. In 1975, long before ‘emotional intelligence’ became all the rage, she contrasted people deeply enmeshed in a community of strong links with those who have a wide range of weak links. She observed that people whose links are mainly strong ‘may never become aware of the fact that their lives do not actually depend on what happens within the group but on forces far beyond their perception and hence beyond their control’. The strong links ‘may prevent individuals from articulating their roles in relation to the complexities of the outside world. Indeed, there may be a distinct weakness in strong ties.’17
By contrast, people with a variety of weak ties were likely to exhibit greater individualism. Having to deal with fundamentally different worlds, Coser said, demands ‘the ability to put oneself in imagination in the position of each role partner in relations to all others, including oneself’. Weak links, therefore, could become a ‘seedbed of individual autonomy’. Empathy creates ‘intellectual flexibility and self-direction’–it enables us to select from a broad repertoire of responses in different circumstances.
Paradoxically, Coser said, we find our own direction and unique inner depths when we deal with people whose expectations and opinions are different from our own. Have you ever had the experience of saying something you don’t really believe, or withholding your true opinion, in order to get on with someone whose views you know are different? According to Coser, this is no bad thing. It enables us to communicate with the other person, and it does us good, too. In confronting someone whose world-view clashes with our own, we become more aware of what our attitudes and views really are. We begin to realise how many of our own notions are thoughtlessly inherited from our parents or our friends. We sort out those things we really do believe in from those we don’t, which allows us to become aware of our inner core, defining who we really are. Conversely, people who don’t mix in different worlds might end up simply replicating the personalities of others in their family, community and circle of friends.
We ‘centre’ and deepen our personality by developing a range of bridges into other worlds. Emotional intelligence, in other words, can be deliberately cultivated through weak links.
Remember Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiments from Chapter Two? Do you think that the most successful chains–those that were completed and the shortest ones–were made up mainly of strong links (friends and family) or of casual acquaintances (weak links)? Time and again researchers have found that, when it comes to communicating from one person to a target in a different world, weak links far outperform strong ones.18
Why does this matter? Well, it reveals that we tend to overuse our family and friends, and underuse people we don’t know particularly well. This is an understandable reflex action, and we all suffer from it. Of course, it’s easier to ask a favour of a close friend rather than someone we’ve just met. Yet, if getting a document closer to a distant target is anything to go by, the people we know less well will achieve better results than those we know intimately.
At first sight this seems strange: our friends are more motivated to help us, yet they perform worse. But it’s a real ‘light bulb’ moment when you realise what this means. Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, friends want to help us three times as much as acquaintances do. And let’s observe–using the small-world experiments as a guide–that acquaintances are three times more effective than friends when helping us with a difficult task. In that scenario, acquaintances are nine times better than friends at providing the connections we need or giving us useful information. Of course, ‘nine times’ is only a guess–it might be five times, or ten, or twenty. But even this rough estimate brings home how much better acquaintances are at getting us ‘distant’ information. And the great thing about acquaintances is that we have so many more of them than friends. Somewhere out there, an acquaintance will be able to provide the missing intelligence that we need–even if it’s someone whose existence we’ve forgotten! The power of the periphery is enormous, so the larger our periphery–the wider the range of diverse worlds we can enter–the greater will be our potential insight.
Why are we so biased towards seeking help that is near at hand rather than far away? The biologist E. O. Wilson supplies a plausible and intriguing reason: