A Great Push to Open Up Your Life
By Sabina Magalini, March 27, 2011, Rome Italy
Richard Koch, famous for the marketing of the 80/20 principle, initially identified by V.Paretro, now, together with Greg Lockwood, exploits and diffuses Granovetter’s ideology of “The Strength of Weak Ties”, the famous paper that initiated a whole new chapter of social science ideology. In this very nice and easily readable book, Granovetter’s principle of the sociological importance in the modern connected world of weak ties, is integrated to a new way of considering society as a network of spokes and hubs. Actually, the extreme originality of this work, because, original it is, resides in the combination of a well-accepted idea with the ongoing evolution of communication technology. The book is structured in thirteen chapters that address many already known and discussed issues such as the concept of the Small World, the existence of Superconnectors (individuals that have the capacity of making many weak ties and utilizing them to raise interpersonal relationships), Hubs and their meaning at individual and societal level, the importance and real meaning of Cyberspace, the detailed description of the importance of Networks in society, how Business relates to all these issues, and how Business has contributed to build sociological principles that may apply to our singular existences. A last chapter is dedicated on how networks and superconnectors can actually act in reducing poverty both in first world and third world realities. Each chapter has a summary of the state of the art of the issue and is followed by a number of interviews and personal experiences of various active members of society, which make the reading very vital and stimulating. Basically the concept goes that weak ties work better for expansion of job opportunities and the evolution of society than strong ties, which often limit and trap initiatives and creative thinking. But as a corollary to this initial concept, the authors also explore the importance of Hubs in the diffusion of ideas. An enlightening historical example is that of Paul (for Christ) and Lenin (for Marx) as creators of hubs that actually did the marketing of the ideas invented by the predecessors. This book is conceived in the context of business world, however it can be useful for anyone at every level. It incredibly gives a push towards a major opening up of mentality and social behavior and positively affects the way we think.
The Hidden Power of Acquaintance
Inside.com [Taiwan] December 19, 2010
《超級關係—弱連結法則所爆發的強大社群力量 》裡針對構成網絡的元素：“強連結“—親密的家人與朋友關係、“弱連結“—泛泛之交，不太熟悉的相識者與“樞紐（Hubs）”—個人所參與的或大或小的團體或組織，強與弱連結的交錯點等三大元素做了充滿實證的介紹，也對長期以來的觀念–“強連結才值得倚賴（事實上也許是帶來限制與障礙）“、“泛泛之交的弱連結毫無價值（事實上會為我們帶來重要的知識、資訊或創新想法）“滾石不生苔（事實上，主要樞紐像是工作每隔三或四年更換最好，長期停留在同一個樞紐只會讓連結弱化）做了反思的提醒。
而越來越普及的網路社群平台像是Blog、微網誌、Facebook正是讓大量弱連結得以發生的好工具。像是因為喜歡攝影，而寫與讀攝影相關的部落格，參與攝影的主題群組，這正是在「攝影迷」這個樞紐中創造了連結與產生連結的可能性。不同的嗜好、對某項理念的認同、共同參與某種活動、同是某部電影的影迷、讀書會…這些都是參與不同樞紐產生更多弱連結的方式。
除了積極參與產生連結之外，《超級關係—弱連結法則所爆發的強大社群力量》也分析了能夠促成弱連結發生的一些特質—因為只有稀少的接觸機會，所以第一印象相當重要、因為缺乏長時間接觸，所以必須建立在高度的信任感與和諧上。這兩點也許會提醒一些因為網路的匿名性而不自覺發表激化言論的人注意，因為也許無形的也影響了你產生弱連結的機會。另外，保持對人的好奇、在沒有外在動機與利益的情況下，仍然願意採取行動把人們連結起來。也都是促成弱連結不斷發生的重要人格特質。
如果你的Facebook堅持只加真實生活裡的朋友、不了解微網誌的碎碎念有什麼意義、覺得寫部落格浪費時間，推薦你讀《超級關係—弱連結法則所爆發的強大社群力量》，你會發現這些看似花時間的網路社交，不只會為你，也會為整個世界，帶來更多意想不到的機會與創新動力。
又，加入Inside-Facebook社群行銷學 粉絲團，認識更多同樣對社群行銷有興趣的新朋友，也會是拓展連結的好方法
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New Volumes That May Challenge The Way You Think
Duncan Stewart
These days there are a heap of books about the power of social networking, and among the better ones is this volume, a fairly easy read by Koch & Lockwood. They owe a great deal to the seminal paper by Mark Granovetter whose sociology thesis, The Strength of Weak Ties demonstrated with real clarity how our networks of contacts make a huge difference in the way we operate as social beings. Put simply, if you have a partner in life you most probably met them through a friend of a friend. If you have a job, then chances are that a friend of a friend had a hand in your career path. In life, it isn’t just WHO you know, that makes all the difference, it’s who THEY know that makes the difference.
As a grand tour of the subject this is a pretty good read. The authors are business consultants, and they’re happy to report their various successes and they wear their heroes on the sleeves – travelling far and wide to illustrate how networks shape both our lives and the direction of our society, in quite surprising, not quite random ways. I personally find this thinking very fascinating because in market research we’ve collectively bought into a very 20th century model about how individuals work in the marketplace of goods and ideas. It’s the same model that predicates how ad agencies work: show the ad and individuals will be motivated to buy the product. Yet this 20th Century model, that assumes an extreme degree of individualism, just doesn’t hold up. In the 1990s for example, Anathoth’s jam – which began as a homemade product that was sold in the Nelson Saturday markets, quickly grew to take major market share off heavyweight players like Watties and Craig’s. They did this with an unpronounceable brand name, unsexy looking plastic packaging and no advertising whatsoever. By ordinary measures Anathoth’s should never have taken off. But everyone overlooked their strength: word of mouth. And that was before internet, so you can imagine how powerful the very fundamental human art of sharing and communicating is in today’s world.
But as the authors point out, it isn’t just about the numbers of friends you claim to have on Facebook. There are many other dynamics that explain the effectiveness of networks. Among these is the degree to which a network has links to other networks, and the degree to which members of a network are homogenous, or singular of purpose and outlook. Innovators, as they point out, often benefit from being loosely linked to several diverse networks. Career-minded people are better, in the long run, by NOT holding down a steady job with the same firm where their own network remains relatively small and insular. Meanwhile sometimes unjust laws of network science come to play. In a networked world, the best ideas don’t always win and gain most currency – rather – the big (think Amazon) tend to get bigger at a more exponential rate than the small.
This is a good companion read with “Linked” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, “Connected”, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, as well as two of my favourites on the subject: “Nexus” by Mark Buchanan and “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” by the brilliant Australian, Duncan Watts. Read any of these books and you can’t help but ponder one of the big questions for researchers: if this topic is so hot, how come we don’t really cover it in the way we do our research? In my view our research designs are collectively embedded with our individualistic assumptions about awareness/motivation/purchase but these don’t adequately explain how we end up with the brand of jam we have.
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From Feministing.com, published September 28, 2010
Not Oprah’s Book Club: Superconnect
By COURTNEY
It’s not often that I read business books, but sometimes it’s fun to dabble in the master’s tools for a moment. Superconnect: Harnessing the Power of Networks and the Strength of Weak Links is filled with examples of the ways in which relationships make the world go round. It’s a feminist kind of wisdom, really, but applied to a very patriarchal world: international business. (The two authors, Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, made part of their fortune with an online gambling business for God’s sake.)
In any case, the thesis is pretty intuitive but there were a few interesting surprises. For example, while we all agree that strong links (family, close friends, a partner) are necessary to a healthy life, it is actually weak links (colleagues, acquaintances etc.) that are the most productive for our economic and social lives. While your college roommate may provide you with moral support when you go through a divorce, it is your college roommate’s brother who is more likely to be the one to refer you to the job you need. I’ve noticed this at work in my own life, without a doubt. Essentially, Koch and Lockwood are arguing that the most healthy and successful people are those that develop a wide diversity of weak links, while maintaining very close strong bonds.
My class analysis red flags were waving high and mighty by about the third page of this sucker. After all, who has access to this diversity of weak links? Networking remains, to my mind, one of the biggest sources of division within our society. The authors get to that eventually:
“In network language, poor people are excluded from forming weak links with strangers or casual acquaintances that could help them make money. The economy from which the poor are excluded is an intricate web of weak links that arise spontaneously and easily when enterprise is established. This can happen only when people own property or other capital, and can rely upon a framework of law to make their assets work for them. Without such links, people are utterly dependent on strong links–friends, family, and the immediate community.”
Interesting huh? On the one hand, this network theory shit is a total argument for diversity. I like. On the other, it reinforces why we remain so economically segregated and why the wealth gap continues to yawn wider and wider. I hate.
http://feministing.com/page/6/
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From The National Post, September 18th, 2010
Book Reveiw: Superconnect, by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood
Reviewed by Jessica Warner
One of the casualties of globalization is the myth of the self-made man, or, if you prefer, the self-made woman. Horatio Alger’s bootblacks, Ayn Rand’s megalomaniacs, the rags-to-riches stories of people like Andrew Carnegie — all seem like dinosaurs in the increasingly interdependent economy of the modern world.
That economy presents particular challenges to entrepreneurs, especially those who pride themselves on being self-starters. Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, both entrepreneurs in their own right, want to help. Their message is a counterintuitive one: Stop fighting the idea that you are caught in a giant spider’s web and start using it to catch some flies of your own.
What makes the argument counterintuitive is its celebration of “weak links,” or the ties that connect us to the acquaintances who exist on the periphery of our own social world. Because these people travel in circles different from our own, they are also the best candidates for connecting us to new people, and, by extension, new ways of thinking and doing. Weak links, in other words, can be a fruitful source of life’s goodies, which for Koch and Lockwood means jobs and money-making ideas.
The idea that acquaintances can be more useful than friends and family goes back to a famous article, Strength of Weak Ties, by Mark Granovetter, in the American Journal of Sociology. Like Koch and Lockwood, Granovetter was interested in networking strategies, and the book he went on to publish, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (1974), covers much the same ground as Superconnect.
The crucial difference is that Koch and Lockwood set out to provide a how-to guide. Their task, as they put it, is to take academic ideas and place them in a “human, social, and practical context that will help you to understand how to shape your own networks, and decide which ones to play in and which to avoid.”
But are there any hard-and-fast rules? No two social worlds are alike, and so the individual success stories that Koch and Lockwood give are of little practical value. These are based on the “60 or so” go-getters they interviewed, and in each the element of serendipity is so strong that the reader is to be forgiven for wondering whether he or she was born under an unlucky star. There is, to my mind, something quixotic about writing a self-help book when the forces it describes amount to a “chain of contacts where something happens at one or two removes, without our involvement, courtesy of our acquaintances and their networks.”
What the reader can do is to improve his or her odds of bumping into the right people. Here Koch and Lockwood offer several tips, the most concrete being that you should change your jobs every four to six years. And when you do, avoid companies that are too large or that bring out the worst in their employees.
Other tips — increasing the number of activities you engage in, choosing your hubs carefully, and so on — are a bit too vague for my taste. Nor are they likely to work if the person following them has little or nothing to offer. This is not a small point. To play the game Koch and Lockwood want you to play, you already have to be one of life’s winners, blessed with an attractive and outgoing personality, and, just as importantly, knowledge and contacts of your own. For networking is never a one-sided affair: The people you are hoping to turn into useful contacts are also hoping you might be useful to them.
The depressing truth, one the authors acknowledge, is that such advice as they can offer is best suited to the up-and-coming and least suited to people who are poor or who have simply grown old and stale in their jobs.
To their credit, Koch and Lockwood grapple with the fundamental inequalities of their model in a chapter with a particularly ambitious mandate: “Poverty, Urban Renewal and Gangsters.” This is by far the most thoughtful chapter, and it features something you don’t usually find in a self-help book: Jane Jacobs’s blueprint for a livable city.
Which brings me back to my main point: Superconnect is not your typical self-help book. There is no surefire recipe for success, no promise that if you have a dream and work hard enough you will succeed. Quite the contrary. The more you go it alone, the less likely you are to succeed in the super-connected world Koch and Lockwood describe. If they are right, we actually have something to look forward to: entrepreneurs who know how to co-operate with other people.
• Jessica Warner is a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and a faculty member of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Her most recent book is The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking: Why Abstinence Matters to the Religious Right.
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/09/18/book-review-superconnect-by-richard-koch-and-greg-lockwood/
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From Management Today, June 1st, 2010
Books: Out of the weak can sweetness come forth?
Julia Hobsbawm
Familiar networks cause group think, say the authors; random encounters work best. It’s music to Julia Hobsbawm’s ears.
Superconnect: The power of networks and the strength of weak links Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood
This is the book equivalent of ‘music to my ears’. Why? Because it lays bare the art and science of my business – the business of networking – and declares it indispensable to successful careers, personal growth and enterprise alike. Written in the earnest but easy style of Malcolm Gladwell-meets-Clay Shirky, Superconnect argues that ‘by co-operating with the network forces around us and harnessing them to our ends, we can swap the delusion that we can control the world as individuals for the reality of creating in collaboration with other people’.
Its central observation, which I agree with, is that what makes networking succeed is not the ’strong links’ of a pre-existing contact base but the ‘weak links’ of random encounters that, if acted upon, can yield jobs, career changes or entrepreneurial stepping stones that would otherwise not exist. Using an array of historical case studies, the book illustrates the point about weak links by quoting John Stuart Mill saying there was value in meeting ‘persons dissimilar to themselves, with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar’.
Given that I completed this review on the day that the Cameron coalition entered Downing Street, I think the authors have a point: cultivate your weak links and you may get power: neither could get it on strong, ie party, links alone. If you’re a wine lover, then you’ll appreciate the relish with which the authors identify the different varieties of grape and yield. They are very down on certain ‘hubs’, the familiar networks, such as the workplace, that can create the kind of ‘group think’ that they say led to Watergate; while being very up on what they call ‘network stars’. These are business models that connect people, such as Auto Trader. They describe the ‘network tailwind that drives the firm forward’ in such businesses, which they call ’superconnectors’. Various ‘isms’ and social types crop up. Naturally, this is de rigueur in any kind of sociological management-meets-can-do book these days. My favourite is ‘Rolodex roulette’, an embellishment of the term ‘weak links’ – meeting as many varied people as possible and seeing what you end up with.
Which brings me to my only rub with the book … A fascinating and enriching read, it is predicated on the idea that most people are comfortable with networking. The truth is that many are not. My own experience is that the main barrier to networking is shyness and an inability to enjoy what the authors and people like me take for granted – that it is fun and productive. I would have liked less arguing of the main points and more analysis of how you can encourage this elusive elixir, rather than inspire people to want it and think they can achieve it through osmosis. Perhaps reticence explains why so many connect virtually – Facebook has a quarter of a billion users, Twitter has 50 million tweets a day – rather than in person.
In an interesting chapter, ‘Cyberspace – brave new world?’, the authors explore the phenomenon of customers clustering around a few websites with which they are familiar, mirroring what Koch and Lockwood call ‘hub-link’ structures in the real world. They say that the internet brings about a ‘terrific intensification of the communication and network trends seen before its invention’. In other words, we humans behave in broadly similar ways, and always have done. This is one of the chief appeals of Superconnect. It points out that networking has been practised throughout history and it has just got better with modern technology. I particularly like the example of Diderot’s Encyclopedie, which failed to take off fully in the 18th century, whereas Wikipedia has succeeded at the start of the 21st century because of the vastly greater numbers of people who were able to take part as contributors, thanks to new technology.
The authors, through a series of weak links, met while on the board of Betfair. They have taken a gamble that readers will be as turned on by networking as they are. I sincerely hope that they win their bet.
- Julia Hobsbawm is the founder and CEO of the networking business Editorial Intelligence. www.editorialintelligence.com.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/channel/HumanCapital/news/1004496/books-weak-sweetness-forth/
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From The Sunday Time, May 30th, 2010
Joined up thinking
Edward King
“Networks” and “networking” are among the most prevalent buzzwords of the past few years. In The Rise of the Network Society, the sociologist Manuel Castells proposed the network as the dominant organisational logic of the information age, a logic characterised by decentralisation and flexibility. Connected, a recent and influential study, suggested that thinking in terms of how information flows through decentralised networks of influence can help us to develop solutions to social problems. The focus of Superconnect, on the other hand, is firmly on entrepreneurship and how networks can make us rich or, in the managerial parlance of its authors, “help us thrive and reach our potential”.
The main idea is that there are three components of the social networks we live in. “Strong links” are close relationships to the family and friends we depend upon on a day-to-day basis; “hubs” are the outfits that shape our education and professional lives; and “weak links” are the connections we make to the people “who occupy the background of our lives”. Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, both successful entrepreneurs, argue that this third category is the most important. Weak links tend to be responsible for our most valuable discoveries. Most life-changing decisions are likely to have been prompted by a random encounter with a stranger or advice from a friend of a friend. The authors advise that if we tap into our “dormant network” of peripheral contacts we’ll have more success in life.
Most examples are drawn from the authors’ professional experience, and the strongest parts of the book are when they are doling out advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. But it is when they try to develop their argument beyond their area of expertise that they are less convincing. They suggest that if we think of ourselves as “autonomous hubs with a useful network in tow” we could free ourselves from a “wage-slave” mentality and all become self-asserting entrepreneurs likethem, which, in the current economic climate, may strike most people as naively optimistic.