Something like that happened over time. Only three thousand years ago, it was impossible to travel any great distance, except at huge inconvenience, expense and danger. As a result, you would have met very few people in your lifetime. Then the Greeks and the Romans spread knowledge, built new cities, traded, increased shipping, constructed roads, and eventually instituted a common religion throughout the Mediterranean and most of the known world. Two steps forward.
In the third century AD, however, the Roman Empire started to collapse. One step back. In the Dark Ages, many towns and cities in Europe lost touch with each other. Communication ceased. Then, thanks to Muslim invaders and scholars, Greek knowledge was rediscovered and networks were forged anew–roads, churches, monasteries, universities, merchants, explorers, artists and architects, even intercontinental voyages, conquest and emigration. Three steps forward. The world became more connected, at first for tiny groups of the elite such as royal families, aristocrats, church leaders and other intellectuals, merchants and financiers; later for industrialists and eventually for ordinary people. At every stage, the people who were best connected, who had privileged access to useful information of all types, had richer, fuller and more useful lives.
We are the lucky beneficiaries of that history. Now the world is smaller, our opportunities are greater.
But Milgram told us something else that’s very important. At any point in time, some people are better connected than others. Much better connected. So their world is much smaller.
Of the sixty-four folders that reached the Boston stockbroker, nearly half came through three final ‘funnels’. Sixteen reached the broker through a Mr Jacobs, a clothes retailer in Sharon. Milgram says that the broker was shocked that Jacobs was by far the most important link to him. We can almost see the broker’s nose wrinkling at the social importance of a mere shopkeeper (maybe he was Jewish and gay to boot, if the illustration in Milgram’s article is anything to go by). Perhaps the broker took some comfort from the fact that ten folders reached him from one of his colleagues, Mr Jones, and another five from Mr Brown, a fellow broker. Milgram dubs these three key funnels ‘sociometric stars’–people who make the world much smaller. He notes that the stars often operate on different dimensions–for instance, geographical in the case of Jacobs, the social focus of Sharon, and professional for Jones and Brown.
One great theme of this book is that there are always a few people who command hugely greater social sway than most of us. These are the ‘superconnectors’ we celebrate. They are in a privileged position. Being more connected, they have greater and earlier access to potentially valuable information. The identity of the superconnectors may surprise us–as the significance of the shopkeeper shocked the stockbroker–but they are today’s elite, the most connected members of our society.
So that is the point of the small world. We all benefit from being more connected than earlier generations. Furthermore, for most of us, there is an underlying structure of interrelationships so that a vast number of people and all the knowledge and possibilities they possess lie just beyond our immediate horizons. Meanwhile, some people–the superconnectors–benefit, and spread benefits, more than the rest of us.
More connections, however, are less important than the right connections. Which brings us to an even more striking and useful discovery than the small world–the strength of weak links.
CHAPTER THREE
THE STRENGTH OF WEAK LINKS
When acquaintances are more useful than friends
It is hardly possible to overrate the value…of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar.
John Stuart Mill (1806–73)8
Robin Field was thirty-seven and conscious that he hadn’t quite reached the point where he wanted to be. He’d done all the right things: a great opening job with Jardine Matheson & Co. in the Far East; a stint at INSEAD business school in France; some success as a manager in LEK, the consulting firm where I was a partner. I had immense confidence in Robin and together we founded Strategy Ventures, to buy into underperforming firms and turn them around. But we couldn’t find the right target, and we were running out of time and money. Robin’s goal of becoming financially independent seemed to be receding.
Yet he did make it. Within a year, we had injected new money and management into Filofax, the personal organiser company. It cost very little; the company was bleeding cash and heading for bankruptcy. Within two years, Robin had turned it around. When we sold it, revenues, profits and cash flow had never been higher–investors made seven times their money. Robin had established a reputation as a turnaround expert and made the money necessary for independence. Filofax changed his life, enabling him to combine a few enjoyable business projects with his passion for sailing.
How did this life-changing event happen? Through a chapter of accidents and the most tenuous connections with people neither Robin nor I knew at all well. When I told Robin I was writing a book about getting valuable information from ‘weak links’–acquaintances of one kind or another–he said right away, ‘Then you’ll be writing about Filofax, of course.’
‘Er, perhaps,’ I said, as I’d forgotten how the company had come into our lives. ‘Remind me how it all started.’
Easier said than done. ‘Well,’ he said, making five syllables out of the word and clearly playing for time, ‘there was this Scottish accountant called…What was his name?’
It took us five minutes to dredge up the name of Sandy Black.
‘I knew Sandy slightly,’ Robin continued, ‘having met him through 3i [a private equity group]. I had tried to sell him some consulting work. He wasn’t interested in that but he did invite me to lunch. Just as we were finishing he happened to mention that Mintel [a market research outfit] was up for sale. You remember–Sandy introduced us to Peter Kraushar, who ran Mintel. Peter in turn introduced us to that curly-haired fellow, Steve Souhami, who ran Mintel’s consulting arm. One of Steve’s clients was David Collischon, the chairman of Filofax. Steve then introduced you to David. That’s how it all happened.
‘Think about the odds against all that happening,’ Robin concluded. ‘It made all the difference to my life. But what if I hadn’t vaguely known Sandy? What if he hadn’t had a lunch cancellation and invited me instead? What if he hadn’t mentioned Mintel, which wasn’t at all important to him? What if he hadn’t introduced us to Peter, or Peter hadn’t put us on to Steve? What if Steve’s consulting company hadn’t worked for David Collischon, and you hadn’t been introduced to him? The odds against all those connections working out must have been thousands to one. And none of those people along the way started as close friends or indeed anything more than casual acquaintances.’
If you haven’t yet discovered the power of weak links, probably the most overlooked network element, you should. Let’s look at how the idea of weak links arose, and why network scientists think they are so important.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969
After graduating with a history degree from Princeton in 1965, Mark Granovetter turned to sociology. We find him working on his Ph.D. at Harvard. He’s putting the finishing touches to a highly readable paper and he is particularly pleased with the title, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. He is less pleased, a few months later, to have his paper rejected for publication.