Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career
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Or consider another set of famous writers separated from Stein’s group by about ten years and the English Channel.7 One of the most influential activities in the writing lives of the British authors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien was their participation in a cluster of writers known as “The Inklings.” Besides Lewis and Tolkien, the group included writers and poets like Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. (Some of the books in Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” are dedicated to Barfield’s children.) The meetings were fairly informal, with many members joining in only sporadically. The meetings were typically held on Thursday nights, either in Lewis’s rooms at Oxford University or at a local pub called The Eagle and Child (or as locals called it, “the Bird and Baby”).
The writers would discuss ideas and influences, read rough drafts of novels or poems, and share feedback with one another. The purpose wasn’t to cowrite anything—almost all of their writing was still done in solitude—nor was it to show off finished works. Instead, the cluster was created for giving and receiving feedback, as well as to connect with similar people, share advice and ideas, and together make each other’s work stronger. It was through this cluster that Lewis and Tolkien developed their deep friendship, which survived the group’s disbanding in the late 1940s. Legend has it that it was Lewis who had to argue with Tolkien that a manuscript he kept working on and reading at meetings was finally ready for print. Without Lewis and this cluster, Tolkien might never have published The Lord of the Rings.
So while modern writing on business and careers tends to decry silos, the undeniable fact is that when individuals are clustered together in a work group—be it a cluster in one location, a department, or a group, like The Inklings, working on individual projects—they tend to get better at what they do and require less supervision. Silos make it easier for teammates and colleagues to hold each other accountable and to communicate quickly. In fact, for some time sociologists struggled to balance the known positive effects of clusters and silos with the demonstrably positive effects of being the broker filling a structural hole. Clusters and silos are indeed important for creativity and productivity, but when they become too siloed, they can be damaging to individuals and organizations.
So how do you determine which silos to seek out and join and which ones to ignore? The answer might be a little surprising. Research suggests that the secret isn’t to ask which silos to join and which to avoid, but rather to focus on how long to interact with a silo and when to move on.
When to Cluster and When to Spread
From a network science perspective, the most interesting thing about clusters is that they really shouldn’t exist. That might be a little bit of overstatement, but ever since sociologists began applying the tools of mathematics and statistics to the study of human networks, they have consistently found that social networks—networks of people as opposed to, say, electrical circuits or mathematical models of nodes and lines—display higher levels of transitivity.8 Transitivity is a fancy word for the idea that if person A knows person B, and B knows person C, then there’s a really good chance that A and C know each other as well. Transitivity leads to clustering, the grouping together of people around each other. And while some transitivity and clustering occurs in network models drawn randomly, social networks seem to have a higher degree of clustering than can be accounted for by chance.9
In other words, humans seem to want to be clustered, even when it’s not good for them. But does that mean it’s always bad?
Despite how we may currently feel about silos and clusters, recent research suggests that we need some level of clustering and silos to help spread information and opportunity. Damon Centola, a University of Pennsylvania professor and director of the university’s Network Dynamics Group, discovered that, quite counterintuitively, breaking down all group boundaries may actually slow the spread of knowledge across a population, not speed it up.10 Some level of clustering actually makes it easier for best practices, complex ideas, and new opportunities to move across a network.
Using a computational model to assess how ideas and practices spread, Centola was able to vary the level of affiliation that different actors in a network feel for those characteristics they share with others. Put simply, he ran variations of networks where individuals feel more or less attached to people like themselves, and hence networks that are more or less clustered.
What he discovered was that, while reducing the clustering of the network helps ideas to spread, the correlation only holds to a point. When group boundaries and clusters are removed entirely, actors in the network have very little influence on anyone—it becomes a network of near-strangers, and hence ideas and information just don’t spread at all. “There’s a belief that the more people interact with strangers, the more that new ideas and beliefs will spread,” Centola said of his findings. “What this study shows is that preserving group boundaries is actually necessary for complex ideas to become accepted across diverse populations.”11 Centola’s findings support the experiences of the Venetian glassmakers and the writers in Paris and Oxford who sought out like-minded people who influenced them and were influenced by them. At the same time, his findings reiterate the warning Ronald Burt issued in his theory of structural holes: staying in a cluster too much can be damaging as well.
In fact, in 2016, Burt himself took up a similar issue when he sought to discover the right way to use clusters to maximize benefits and minimize drawbacks. Burt teamed up with Jennifer Merluzzi, a professor of management at Tulane University, to find the best way to leverage clusters while also being a structural hole.12 In his work with a large investment bank a number of years earlier, Burt had collected data on 350 of its top-tier bankers. Investment banking is an ideal source of data for this type of experiment since bankers often work in teams on discreet projects, then break up once the project is over. Post-project, different bankers take different approaches to finding a new project. Some just dive right into the next available project team, while others wait, and still others work part-time or consult while waiting for that next perfect assignment.
But eventually, everyone has joined a new, small project team. In other words, some bankers stay inside of small clusters the entire time and then jump right to the next cluster when the project is over, while others oscillate between working in clusters (project teams) and brokering (building bridges to new teams and projects). Burt was able to collect data on who was using which strategy, as well as performance ratings, bonus information, and salaries, for all 350 bankers.
Using this data, Burt and Merluzzi compared which post-project strategy was most effective. They found that bankers who moved between project teams and brokered connections got the most rewards. These bankers spent time in clusters, but they also formed ties in the organization by not jumping into another cluster right away. Instead, they had a wide range of contacts and hence a wider range of opportunity than their clustered counterparts. These brokers “tend to do better than people who only talk to the same set of people with the same set of knowledge,” said Merluzzi. “These brokers have gained valuable social capital.”13 And that social capital turned into financial capital too. While the perception of their performance suffered when they weren’t locked into a project team, the oscillating bankers collected far more in bonuses and salaries over time.
Burt and Merluzzi’s research focused on individual careers inside of one organization, but their findings echo the results of a similar study done across an entire industry almost twenty years prior. When the sociologist Brian Uzzi was a doctoral student (he is now a full professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University), he decided to study a network that was already quite close to him: the garment industry. When Uzzi’s family immigrated to the United States from Italy, they found their footings in the needle trade, and Uzzi wanted to study it further. He surveyed the garment industry in New York City, first by building out a network based on company information and transactions recorded by the International Ladi
es’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), to which more than 80 percent of the city’s apparel company workers belonged.14 He also conducted interviews with twenty-three companies in that network, often interviewing multiple leaders inside each firm. In total, he collected around 117 hours of interviews on various garment companies’ business practices. He also collected data on survival rates—whether or not a company managed to stay in business.
What he found was that New York’s garment industry was a vast network, and that everyone managed relationships in that network differently. As Burt and Merluzzi discovered in their research, different individuals had different styles. That is, some preferred to be more clustered and some were more open. Some companies and company leaders chose to do business only with a small circle of trusted allies, what Uzzi labeled “close-knit ties.” Others chose to do small amounts of business with a large set of relationships and to keep their relationships purely transactional. Uzzi labeled these “arm’s-length ties.” Most fell somewhere in between. Just as Centola found in his research on the need for clusters, Uzzi found that having strong close-knit ties enhanced a firm’s chances of survival in the industry—that clusters and small circles did seem to help.
But only up to a point.
Eventually, being too clustered and doing business with too few firms had a negative impact on survivability. Uzzi’s research revealed that the most successful companies had leaders who maintained a healthy mixture of close-knit and arm’s-length ties—whose real-world networks resembled Centola’s models. These companies were in a position to choose the best options from among a diverse set of relationships. They had their small circle of allies with whom they could go deep into the relationship, sharing a lot of business and also learning and growing from these relationships, but they also had a collection of distant (let’s call them weak) ties with whom they could scan the whole environment and see more opportunities than their more tightly clustered counterparts could.
Taken altogether, this research tells a much different tale about silos and clusters. There’s a reason for our tendency toward transitivity—our desire to gravitate toward silos. Clusters are good for us, and good for our growth. The trick is to make sure we’re not so clustered that we ignore opportunities to be structural holes. At the same time, we need to make certain that pursuing our goals as brokers between clusters doesn’t leave us clusterless. Pulling that trick off can be difficult. In many industries, the balance of close-knit groups and arm’s-length ties has already been decided. If that’s the case in your industry, you might just have to create your own solution.
If You Can’t Find Clusters, Create Them
Gertrude Stein’s salons not only served to inspire Ernest Hemingway and help him in his development but, almost 100 years later, are still inspiring people to find their own clusters.15 One such group is the quartet of Elliott Bisnow, Brett Leve, Jeremy Schwartz, and Jeff Rosenthal. In 2008, these four friends and former college classmates were all working as entrepreneurs or for start-ups. While they were happy as a small band of merry innovators, they wanted to expand their circle and also meet other fellow entrepreneurs building interesting companies. To facilitate that, they planned a ski trip and rented a house with space for them and fifteen others. Then they started reaching out. They made a list of dream connections and started cold-calling, emailing, and sometimes even messaging on social media to other young entrepreneurs who inspired them.
It worked. They filled a house in Park City, Utah, with entrepreneurs like Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, charity: water’s Scott Harrison, and David Mayer de Rothschild, the environmentalist and explorer who is one of a small number of people ever to visit both the North and South Poles. The four organizers left that surreal ski trip with a resolve to make sure it wasn’t a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They needed to get the group back together and even expand it. So they planned a follow-up event a few months later. They also asked each of the original guests to invite two friends.
With an expanded guest list, and an even more impressive collection of people, simple momentum took over. They adopted the name Summit Series for their events and developed a brief mission statement of what they were about, which Rosenthal once described as: “Gather people doing innovative work, regardless of their discipline, or just thoughtful, open-minded, kind people we’d want to spend time with, regardless of personal or professional success.”16 Certainly some of the momentum was triggered by the particular collection of people who had attended. But professional success came pretty quickly to Summit, and some of it was simply due to the fact that, at the time, there was no other such gathering place for these individuals. In effect, the four friends had built the kind of cluster that so many entrepreneurs were looking for.
Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur (and a cofounder of PayPal and one of the first people to invest in Facebook) described the value of this new cluster by saying, “The Summit Series team knows that communities of talented people driven to change the world can successfully change it.”17 And despite it being a young community, it already has. By 2009, the Summit team was asked to bring their collection of entrepreneurs to the White House for a meeting between the new leaders of the Obama administration and the existing leaders of the technology start-up world. Summit events were also the catalyst behind several successful start-ups. It was at a Summit event that the founders of Spotify met entrepreneur Sean Parker (of Napster and Facebook). Parker was instrumental in helping Spotify launch in the United States.18
In 2011, Summit took to the seas. The team chartered a cruise ship and planned a three-day conference for more than 1,000 young entrepreneurs. The conference, called quite descriptively “Summit at Sea,” featured talks from notable entrepreneurs and celebrities, but it was the ship itself that provided the biggest benefit. During the short cruise, everyone had to unplug from their regular lives (the ship was reportedly without wireless Internet for the entire journey) and focus instead on knowing and helping each other. This short-term entry into a cluster was focused on development, followed by going back out into one’s own network. The conference logistics almost mirrored the implications of Burt and Merluzzi’s study, but the next stage in Summit’s evolution provided an even clearer picture.
In April 2013, the Summit team bought a mountain: Powder Mountain in Utah.19 A Summit attendee had brought it to the attention of the team: “What if Summit Series could literally be at the summit of a mountain?” After researching the opportunity—the ski resort had changed hands a few times as investors struggled to develop it—and gathering investors, the team bought Powder Mountain for $40 million. While it’s still being developed, their plan is to build a small town and a members-only lodge. The community will stay small at only around 500 home sites, and most of them will likely be second homes for longtime Summit attendees. But in building the physical community, Summit is re-creating something like Stein and Hemingway’s Paris circle: an actual place that houses the needed community. Powder Mountain will allow individual Summit members to leave their everyday network, connect with this clustered community, and then go back out into the world to make an impact—to participate, in effect, in a sort of long-term and recurring Summit at Sea. The end result of the project is not yet known, but the vision is inspiring. Perhaps 100 years from now the iconic story won’t be about Stein’s Paris salons but about Powder Mountain’s ski lodge.
If planning and building a whole town seems like a lot of work just to find the right cluster, then it’s possible to start smaller. Instead of 500 home sites and a mountaintop lodge, how about just meeting for coffee once a month? That is what Tina Roth Eisenberg focused on, and she saw her idea grow into a movement in its own right.
In 2008, Eisenberg, a Swiss-born designer, built her own cluster from a simple idea. It’s now grown into an international movement that helps give thousands of creative professionals the benefits of community every month.
But l
et’s start at the beginning. Eisenberg moved to New York City in 1999 without any professional or personal contacts in the design industry.20 That didn’t last long. Knowing how important it was to have a cluster of contacts, she started engaging with her professional community by building what she herself needed and what others could benefit from as well. Today she runs Swissmiss, a hugely popular design blog. She manages TeuxDeux, a productivity app that uses design to focus users on what’s important. She founded Tattly, a temporary tattoo company with products created by world-class designers. She’s started not one but two coworking spaces. But her great community building project—and the one that’s scaled the most by far—is CreativeMornings.
As a professional designer, Eisenberg was fortunate to be able to attend many of the large-scale conferences on the annual design circuit. When she blogged about her experiences, she found that lots of her readers longed to attend these types of events but couldn’t for financial reasons, logistical reasons, or some other reason. Even those who did attend longed for something slightly more permanent. “I realized that most of us attend conferences because we want to meet like-minded people,” she recalled. “But the problem with conferences is that these communities are temporary and only happen once a year.”21 Eisenberg wanted to build something recurring, and something local.