November
2002 - Six degrees of separation
I found myself confronting a
slightly awkward truth this week when trying to
recall the various jobs I had done in a 27-year
career. Not one of them came from replying to
a job advertisement.
Most of my job interviews arose
through various tenuous connections with people
who were willing to make the right noises in the
right circles. Apparently this is not uncommon:
Mark Granovetter, a Stanford- based professor,
published a paper in the 1960s, The Strength of
Weak Ties, that investigated the way people used
social connections to secure jobs.
After interviewing dozens of
managerial and professional workers, asking who
had helped them find their job, he kept getting
the same reply. The job contact did not come through
a friend but through someone who was no more than
an acquaintance. His subsequent paper proposed
that when it came to finding a job our relatively
weak social connections were more important than
close friendships.
The reason is that our strongest
friendships tend to involve tight-knit clusters
of friends in which everyone tends to know everyone
else. Acquaintances, on the other hand, have their
own friendship clusters, so the acquaintance,
rather than the friend, is likely to have the
more useful connection. The same applies with
close colleagues and the more distant contacts
we have through our work.
The Granovetter story is related
by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in Linked, The New Science
of Networks *. I have mentioned the book before
but it deserves a broader airing for the way it
explains relationships that could turn out to
be increasingly significant in the organisation
of work and in society as a whole.
Some months ago I mentioned the
idea of "six degrees of separation",
made famous in an experiment by Stanley Milgram,
the sociologist, who measured the number of links
it took for people chosen at random in Kansas
and Nebraska to send parcels to a named recipient
in Boston. They were simply asked to send the
parcel to someone who they thought was likely
to be more closely connected with the recipient
than they were.
Although the average number of
links was close to six, in some cases the parcel
made it with just two links; in others it needed
as many as 11. It was clear that some people were
better connected than others. As Malcolm Gladwell
noted in his book TheTipping Point, "Sprinkled
in every walk of life are a handful of people
with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends
and acquaintances. They are the connecters."
When connections are confined
to specific industries, the degrees of separation
tend to be even smaller. A few years ago, a group
of students from Albright College in Reading,
Pennsylvania, entertained viewers of a celebrity
talk show by demonstrating the close connections
of Kevin Bacon, their favourite Hollywood actor.
In fact Mr Bacon proved to be far less well connected
than many of his fellow actors. Rod Steiger was
the best-connected Hollywood actor, ahead of Donald
Pleasence; Kevin Bacon came 876th.
These rankings were established
by another group of students, at the University
of Virginia, when they set up The Oracle of Bacon
website** using statistics from an internet database
of films, www.IMDb.com . I can recommend a visit.
For example, it takes just three films to connect
Richard Branson, chairman of Virgin, and Shirley
Temple. Shirley Temple appeared in Hollywood Gad-About
in 1934 with Billy Barty, who appeared with Dudley
Moore in Foul Play in 1978. Dudley Moore appeared
with Richard Branson in Derek and Clive Get the
Horn in 1979.
Unfortunately there is no website
out there that makes similar connections for executives
(other than those who have appeared in films,
such as Michael Eisner, president of the Disney
Corporation, who is connected to Elizabeth Taylor
via Whoopi Goldberg). But studies have been carried
out into the connectedness of board directors
among the Fortune 1000. A team of academics from
the University of Michigan Business School looked
at the web of connections between 7,682 directors
who between them held 10,100 directorships. While
most of them served on no more than one board,
a privileged 7 per cent held three or more directorships.
The Michigan team calculated
that the members of this smallest cluster of directors
were, on average, just 4.6 handshakes away from
any other director of these top companies. One
director, the Washington lawyer Vernon Jordon,
had collected 10 directorships that put him, on
average, just three handshakes away from the rest.
The ideas surrounding the strength
of weak ties suggest that sector-based connections,
while useful, are far less impressive than those
maintained by true connecters such as Mr Jordan,
who are skilled at crossing boundaries between
different walks of life. These individuals act
as hubs in successful networks that do not consist
of randomly distributed individuals. A database
is not a network . This is fundamental to understanding
how networks can be exploited in the distribution
of work, because it reveals that positioning is
vital if people are to take advantage of potential
opportunities. If we assume that there is plenty
of work out there for all of us, it follows that
the better connected we are, the more choices
we are likely to have over the tasks we may wish
to undertake.
Mr Barabasi notes that networks
have a natural order, corresponding to certain
rules of physics. The network , for example, can
endow a greater advantage on those who are its
most influential members, on the lines of the
80/20 principle outlined by the Italian economist
Vilfredo Pareto. They can, in some circumstances,
even promote a winner-takes-all form of dominance,
which does not tend to happen in the capitalist
system although Mr Barabasi points to Microsoft's
dominance of operating systems.
But is the language of dominance,
of winners and losers, so readily applicable to
networks ? If their influence is growing in business,
through the popularity of alliances and partnerships,
their co-operative nature is likely to change
the way we compete, possibly leading to different
patterns of employment.
Even if hierarchies are retained,
they too may differ, emphasising different human
qualities - such as connectedness. One day, perhaps,
it may be commonplace to see enterprises guided
by freelance influencers or connecters, charging
market rates, rather than relying on the increasingly
costly presiding presence of an incumbent chief
executive.
*Linked, The New Science
of Networks , by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, is published
by Perseus, price Dollars 26. **see the star links
section at www.oracleofbacon.org
