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

by David Burkus

  I won’t be sharing anecdotal advice from stereotypical networkers; instead, we will examine real case studies of people and companies who found success because they found (knowingly or not) a strategy in line with the research.

  Knowing how networks come together is the secret weapon behind a powerful networking strategy. It works better than the entire collection of tools.

  And that is where we are headed.

  The next chapter explains the types of network connections that are most likely to provide you with new information and opportunities (and a quick hint: it’s probably not who you tend to interact with the most). After that, chapter 2 examines an old party game and reveals the clues it holds to just how large and useful your total network really is. Chapter 3 deals with your networking strategy: is it better to try to connect with everyone in one industry or profession, or is it better to be the connector between these groups? Chapter 4 answers the common call to break down silos with a reminder that sometimes staying in your silo can have tremendous benefits—it just depends on how often you’re there. Chapter 5 examines how your network affects the teams you rely on, and explains why part of cultivating a high-performing network is being willing to decrease or cut off how frequently you interact with some connections. Chapter 6 describes just how large your network can become, and how above-average networkers really do have above-average networks. Chapter 7 looks at the implications of above-average networks for your own plan: will it always be an uphill battle and a constant process to make key connections, or can you grow your network passively?

  Then we turn to some of the more surprising findings from network science that will have you reevaluating your entire network. Chapter 8 describes an intriguing quirk of social networks: it is possible to appear more popular and connected than you really are—but is it worthwhile? Chapter 9 issues a dire warning for anyone building their network: more isn’t better if it means more of the same. Chapter 10 reveals the solution to this dilemma, showing that where and how you make new connections affect how valuable they will become. Chapter 11, the final chapter, moves away from the entire network to look at individual connections, revealing that part of who you know includes how (and how well) you know them.

  In addition to the implications for individuals, the findings from network science carry implications for how leaders shape their organizations and how companies try to market their brands through customer networks. When relevant, these will be explored as well.

  To help you move from ideas to action, or from scientific research to practice, each chapter ends with an activity you can do quickly that will help you either better understand your current network or take the first steps to strengthening it. In addition, we examine the role of online tools and social media services in building and maintaining your network and show you when those tools might actually become counterproductive—which happens more often than you might think, since online tools only seem to work well when they reinforce off-line principles of human connection. (Perhaps that is why studies are showing that the more time individuals spend with online-only connections the more lonely they report feeling. Also, as people increase their use of online tools, their sense of social isolation seems to increase as well.15)

  Your connections matter. But so does how you know them, why you know them, where you met them, and who else they know. All of these elements are explained by the network around you—all your friends of friends.

  By the end of this book, I hope you have become more effective at making and strengthening the key connections that will change your work and career. But I hope you do that not by just taking advice. Rather, I hope you become more effective because you’ve learned how the network around you works—and how to work it.

  —1—

  Find Strength in Weak Ties

  Or

  Why Your Old Friends Are Better Than Your New Friends

  We tend to act as if our closest friends are our biggest assets. While that may be true for social support or for trusted information, it’s not so true when it comes to opportunity. Research shows that our biggest opportunities and best sources of new information actually come from our “weak ties” or “dormant ties”—our connections with people we don’t see often or haven’t spoken to in a long time. This means that if we want to learn something new or make a job change, reaching out to our old friends is a better move than keeping it “just between friends” by connecting only with the people we’re closest to now.

  LORENZO FERTITTA NEVER PLANNED ON disrupting the prizefighting industry or on saving the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) from regulatory extinction.

  The son of casino magnate Frank Fertitta Jr., Lorenzo was no stranger to the world of combat sports, but his future was almost certainly going to be in the casino industry. However, because of an old and distant high school friend, he has spent the better part of the last two decades turning the once-crippled Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) franchise into a worldwide brand valued at more than $4 billion. But Lorenzo Fertitta isn’t even the lead actor in the story. That title goes to Dana White, for reactivating a weak tie in his network that dramatically enhanced both his and Lorenzo Fertitta’s net worth.

  From the outside looking in, White and Fertitta resemble and act like lifelong friends on a journey to continuously grow the UFC and the sport of MMA. But their deep friendship is actually relatively new. They attended the same high school, Bishop Gorman, a Roman Catholic preparatory school in Las Vegas, Nevada, and tended to associate with the same circles of friends, but they themselves rarely interacted. “We had a lot more in common after school than in school,” said White. “I got kicked out of Gorman twice. Lorenzo was the role model: A-student, football player, going on to college and college after college.”1

  White was correct. Lorenzo Fertitta went on to the University of San Diego and then earned an MBA from New York University. After school, Fertitta partnered with his brother, Frank III, first by starting a business renting pay phones and slot machines, then buying real estate on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and finally merging their company with their father’s chain of casinos and taking the new entity public.

  As for White, after he got kicked out of Bishop Gorman not once but twice, his parents sent him to Maine to live with his grandmother. White finished high school there and actually spent some time at college, but did not graduate. He floated through a variety of different jobs, everything from a bellhop to a boxing trainer. Eventually, he moved back to Las Vegas and started a gym. Then he started two more. Eventually, White found himself managing the careers of two fighters, Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell, as they competed in the UFC. It would be nearly a decade after White left Bishop Gorman before he talked to either of the Fertitta brothers again.2

  When they did, it was back in Las Vegas, and it was the result of a chance encounter at the wedding of a mutual friend from high school. Dana and Lorenzo quickly bonded over their mutual love of combat sports. White’s passion for MMA quickly turned both of the Fertitta brothers into new fans. Lorenzo Fertitta was already serving on the Nevada State Athletic Commission, which regulated all combat sports in that state. Perhaps most notably, he was a commissioner when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. “I was one of the guys who had to tell Mike to pack up and go,” Lorenzo Fertitta said.3 It was a time when all combat sports, especially MMA, were being highlighted for their brutality.

  As for the UFC, it was fighting hard just to stay alive and in business. Senator John McCain was leading the charge to ban MMA and even referred to it as “human cockfighting.” One by one, each state and state athletic commission began to outlaw the sport, forcing the UFC to become creative in how it staged its events. Eventually, it lost its pay-per-view distribution, which meant ticket sales at live shows had to serve as the main source of revenue.

  Through his work managing fighters, White learned that the UFC’s original owners were tired of putting up a fight and were looking to sell their franchise. So White r
eached out to his long-lost friend Lorenzo Fertitta. Within a month, the Fertitta brothers had purchased the UFC for $2 million, using private funds. “It was probably the worst brand in the United States because of all the negativity around it,” Lorenzo Fertitta said. The brothers did not even have the blessing of their father. “Dad was a fairly conservative guy,” said Frank Fertitta. “He asked us not to do it. I think that’s the only time that Lorenzo and I actually went against what he wanted us to do. Thank God we did.”4

  Little by little, White and the Fertittas grew the struggling league from backwater shows to sold-out arenas and millions of television viewers. The Fertitta brothers knew that the sport would not survive without regulatory approval. Fortunately, Lorenzo’s connections with the athletic commissions helped him understand and work toward the changes they would need to make to get that approval. They added a new rule structure, established weight classes, and by some accounts made it a safer sport for participants than boxing. White’s experience with the fighters they inherited no doubt made those changes an easier sell to the athletes themselves.

  All this being said, their first big event was, by most accounts, a disaster. It was disorganized and ran over time, so the pay-per-view broadcast was cut short before the main event.5 However, the Fertittas continued to put more effort and money (over $40 million) into the venture. In 2004, they gambled even bigger. One of the Fertittas’ casinos, Green Valley Ranch, had played host to a reality show on the Discovery Channel, and the brothers thought a similar venture might help raise awareness of their fight league.6 They pitched a show where aspiring young fighters were shown living and training together, all the while competing for a contract with the UFC. The show was turned down by every network except Spike TV, which agreed to air it if the Fertittas paid the $10 million production cost themselves.

  The show was a hit almost from the beginning and rapidly increased the fan base for mixed martial arts. It also made Dana White into a television star, showcasing his brash style, his understanding of what it means to be a fighter, and his knowledge of what it takes to be a champion. The show has now run for over twenty seasons and continues to recruit new fans to the sport. By 2005, the Fertittas had recouped their original investments in the UFC.7 Senator McCain has even changed his tune, if only slightly. “They haven’t made me a fan, but they have made progress,” he said in a 2007 interview on National Public Radio.8

  As part of the purchase, the Fertittas maintained an equal ownership of the enterprise, something their lawyers were not happy about.9 Legal counsel wanted a way to resolve disputes in case of a stalemate. They solved that in two ways. First, White was given a 10 percent stake in the organization and tasked with running the day-to-day operations. Second, they added a clause in their ownership contract that all disputes between the brothers would be settled with a jiujitsu match, with White playing the role of referee. “It hasn’t happened yet,” Lorenzo Fertitta joked.10 The two brothers and White have a great relationship. They work out together regularly and communicate frequently. “We both bring something very different to the table, but at the end of the day, we’ve got a great dynamic,” Lorenzo Fertitta said.11

  In 2011, the UFC signed a seven-year broadcasting deal with the FOX Sports Media Group valued at $700 million.12 The company produces more than forty live events every year and is broadcast in more than 1 billion households around the world. In 2013, Dana White was named the “sports innovator of the year” for his role in the turnaround.13 And in 2016, the Fertittas and White successfully sold the UFC for $4 billion to a group of private investors, including the William Morris Endeavor Agency, Silver Lake Partners, KKR, and MSD Capital (the investment firm of the technology billionaire Michael Dell). “It’s the largest deal ever in the history of sports,” Lorenzo Fertitta said at the time.14 He is not far off. In terms of sports, it is twice what Steve Ballmer paid in 2014 to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers. In terms of all entertainment, $4 billion rivals what the Walt Disney Company paid George Lucas for the entire Star Wars franchise in 2012, which was hailed as the “deal of the century” when it happened.15 For his part, White’s personal payout was reported to be more than $350 million.16 Pretty good payday for a former bellhop and boxing trainer.

  Whatever measure is used, the story of the UFC is one about a remarkable transition from the brink of collapse to a multibillion-dollar valuation. And none of it would have happened without a chance meeting of two former classmates.

  The Forgotten Network

  White and Fertitta’s chance interaction at that wedding may seem like a fluke, but it is actually a textbook case of how the forgotten parts of our network yield bigger opportunities than most of us realize. Their relationship at the time resembled what sociologists refer to as weak ties—people we maintain a connection with but rarely interact with. By contrast, strong ties are the connections we regularly return to—those friends and coworkers we feel comfortable around because we know, like, and trust them.

  Our tendency when things get tough is to seek out trusted, familiar counsel. When we need a new job, for example, we default to those close to our network. We tell our friends and family, then skip over our weak ties, ironically, and go right to coldly responding to job postings online. Or when we need advice about a major problem, we tend to share our dilemma only with those close to us—those we feel comfortable around. But that comfort comes at a cost. Most of the strong ties in our network are connected to each other. They are often so tightly clustered that information known by one person is already known by everyone in that cluster. In contrast, our weak ties often build a bridge from one cluster to another and thus give us access to new information. Even though the strong ties in our life are more likely to be motivated to help us, it turns out that our weak ties’ access to new sources of information may be more valuable than our strong ties’ motivation.

  Consider how Dana White’s strong ties were already in the UFC world, while Lorenzo Fertitta’s network gave him access to casinos to put on events and the connections to the athletic commission needed to change attitudes toward the sport. White found himself inside a community of individuals who knew their sport was dying but couldn’t find a way to revive it; Fertitta was in a different community of Las Vegas entertainers who mostly focused on boxing. White had the knowledge of MMA; Lorenzo Fertitta had the knowledge of how to get the sport regulated and marketed like boxing. Their chance meeting at a friend’s wedding connected these two seemingly distant clusters and unlocked an extremely valuable solution.

  This counterintuitive finding first came from a now-classic study by the sociologist Mark Granovetter. In 1970, as a PhD student at Harvard University, Granovetter decided to conduct a study of job transitions. When surveying respondents, he would often ask whether a friend had told them about their current job. Respondents would often answer with something like: “Not a friend, but an acquaintance,” which suggested to Granovetter that he ought to look further.17 In the end, he surveyed hundreds of professional, technical, and managerial job-changers living in the suburbs of Boston, asking them about the contacts who had told them about the job opportunity they ended up applying for and accepting.

  Specifically, he asked how often they were seeing those contacts around the time they received the job information. Granovetter used three categories: often (at least twice a week), occasionally (more than once a year but less than twice a week), and rarely (once a year or less). When Granovetter looked at the collected results, he found that fewer than 17 percent of job-changers saw their contacts often. Over 55 percent said they saw their contact occasionally, and over 27 percent said they rarely saw this person.

  While between once a year and less than twice a week is admittedly a large margin, it’s very representative of the variance in contact most of us maintain with our weaker relationships. Weak ties are those colleagues we don’t plan to see, but when we do it’s easy to catch up quickly. “The skew is clearly to the weak end of the continuum,” Granovetter wrot
e in his 1973 paper presenting this data.18 That paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” would go on to become one of the most cited papers in sociology.

  Granovetter’s surprising findings run opposite to what most of us do when faced with a problem to solve, a choice to make, or the sudden need to find a job. It makes sense to share your situation with friends, family members, and trusted colleagues. They know you best and are most interested in helping you. But, as Granovetter found, the odds that they have any useful information or leads that you don’t already have are slim. Moreover, the odds that everyone in your close circle will offer the same information or advice are great—our closest contacts tend to share the same contacts as us. Our weak ties are irregular contacts precisely because they tend to operate in different social circles. They interact with people different from our inner circle and learn different information. As a result, weak ties become our best source for the new information that we need to resolve our dilemmas.

  Weak ties are stronger sources of information not just about job opportunities. Granovetter’s work inspired researchers to study the other ways in which weak ties bring us new and valuable information and opportunities. Martin Ruef, a professor at Duke University, studied how entrepreneurs rely on strong and weak ties and the effects on their ability to be innovative.19 Ruef surveyed more than 700 entrepreneurial teams who were launching new businesses and gathered data on the sources of their ideas, the structure of their team, the advisers or partners they sought, their patent applications, and the novelty of their business ideas. In particular, he was looking at the strength of the connections between the source of the teams’ business ideas and the innovativeness of those ideas. To judge the strength of connections, he asked participants to classify the source of their business idea as: (1) coming from discussions with family and friends (strong ties); (2) coming from discussions with business associates, customers, or suppliers (weak ties); or (3) coming from observing discussions in the media, in the industry, or among existing competitors (what he called directed ties, since the information flow was only in one direction). To assess innovation, Ruef used two measures: patent and trademark applications as an objective measurement, and a subjective comparison of the teams’ ideas against long-standing research on the categories of innovation.