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

by David Burkus

  List five friends who do work you know very little about.

  Set a time to meet with each one in the next thirty days, for coffee or lunch or just to hang out. Make sure to take time to ask questions about what they are working on. You’re not looking for anything specific that will help your own work or create an opportunity. You’re just looking to learn. (These are your friends after all; you’re not trying to take advantage of them.)

  Make a list of five colleagues whom you don’t know very well.

  Make an appointment to meet with each one of your colleagues in the next thirty days. As with your friends, you’re looking to learn. If you sense that they don’t want to reveal too much about themselves, then don’t worry. (They probably haven’t read this chapter of this book yet.) But take an interest in them and show it. You never know, you might make a new best friend.

  Practicing Online

  In the online world, social media websites often further the divide in our thinking between business and personal. There are services like LinkedIn for professional contacts and ones like Facebook and Instagram for personal ones. Some industries even have their own specialized social networks that work like LinkedIn and are just for academics, or creatives, or whoever else you can think of. If you are looking to grow colleagues into friends, or friends into coworkers, it may be helpful to start by determining whether you’re connected with them on just one service or both—if not, then reach out. If they don’t respond to your friend request, don’t feel bad. Everyone has different rules of thumb for how they categorize relationships. But you’ve done a great deed just by demonstrating your openness.

  For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.

  Conclusion

  Or

  Why You Should Choose Each Friend of a Friend Carefully

  IN THE LATE 1990S, Dr. Nicholas Christakis was troubled. As a physician working in hospice care, he was no stranger to death—he knew that his patients were close to death. What troubled him more and more was watching the toll that one death in a relationship took on the surviving member. Often when a married person fell terminally ill, he noticed, the spouse would quickly develop a life-threatening illness as well. As a researcher and medical doctor, Christakis was familiar with the “widowhood effect” and had even researched it. But he was beginning to wonder: if a marital relationship has such a strong effect on health, do other kinds of relationships have noticeable effects too?1

  Christakis pondered this possibility as he transitioned from working in Chicago’s South Side to conducting research at Harvard University in Cambridge. By then, he had decided he wanted to study the health effects of relationships—but he had also decided it was too big a task to research all on his own. In the true fashion of networks, a potential partner emerged through a friend of a friend. Christakis was introduced by a colleague to James Fowler, who worked on campus with him (in an adjoining building in fact). Fowler was studying networks, mostly from a political perspective. Together, the two decided they wanted to take on the new challenge of looking at how our social networks affect our health—but doing so would require collecting massive amounts of data.

  In fact, when Christakis and Fowler were outlining their project and looking for grants, their initial estimate was that it would cost around $25 million to collect and analyze the data needed to answer their question.2 Needless to say, it was hard to find a donor. Undeterred, Christakis and Fowler began looking for preliminary data—data that had already been collected—with the hope that they might be able to use some of it as a proof of concept in their grant proposals. Instead, they stumbled upon an unexpected wealth of health and network data hidden in Framingham, Massachusetts.

  Since 1948, researchers from Boston University have been following a community of people in Framingham. The researchers began a set of regular interviews and physical examinations with more than 5,000 men and women from the town. As the initial participants grew older, the researchers then enrolled a second and eventually a third generation of participants. While the amount of effort put into studying these residents has been immense, so have the findings that have resulted from the Framingham Heart Study. Much of what we know about heart disease can be traced back to this study.

  When Christakis and Fowler examined the data, however, they found that it covered more than just the heart health of the participants. They were studied for all sorts of medical conditions, and during interviews they were probed with all sorts of demographic questions, including questions about family members and friends. In the end, the Framingham Heart Study researchers had collected so much information that Christakis and Fowler didn’t end up needing a $25 million grant—they just needed to ask different questions of this already massive data set.

  To start, Christakis and Fowler chose something relatively simple to measure objectively: obesity. Unlike a lot of health conditions that require that a patient first present with symptoms, obesity measurements generally rely on body-mass index (BMI), a measurement of your weight relative to your height. Since height and weight were taken at almost every physical examination, it was easy to see a progression over time. If someone was given a BMI of over 30, he or she was considered obese. The interview data, especially survey questions about family and friendships, allowed the pair to construct a network map of participants in the study; the fact that those questions were asked again during follow-up examinations allowed them to track changes in the network over time.

  When they had constructed their evolving network map, including who had developed obesity and when, they found something amazing: obesity really was an epidemic.3 Not only was it increasing in prevalence, but the spread of obesity seemed to be influenced by the network.

  According to their results, if a friend of yours becomes obese, you yourself are 45 percent more likely than chance to gain weight over the next two to four years. More surprisingly, however, Christakis and Fowler found that if a friend of your friend becomes obese, your likelihood of gaining weight increases by about 20 percent—even if you don’t know that friend of a friend. The effect continues one more person out. If a friend of the friend of your friend develops obesity, you are still 10 percent more likely than random chance to gain weight as well. Moreover, their results suggest that more is going on than a tendency among obese people to hang out together. Because they surveyed people over thirty-two years, they were able to show a real cause-and-effect relationship between individual friends (and friends of friends) and weight gains. While the researchers looked for a variety of explanations, the most likely one appears to be norms. If your friend is obese or a friend of a friend is obese, that changes your perception of what is an acceptable body size and your behavior changes accordingly.

  When Christakis and Fowler’s results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the reaction was predictably strong. The story that “your friends might be making you fat” was quickly and enthusiastically covered by major media outlets. That finding certainly made for a sensational headline, but the more intriguing finding of Christakis and Fowler’s original study is not that weight gain is an epidemic, but rather that we are subtly influenced by people we likely don’t even know. The researchers termed this effect “three degrees of influence.” While we might be separated from everyone in the world by six or fewer degrees, three of those six degrees appear to be influencing us in ways we are not even aware of.

  In a follow-up study, Christakis and Fowler found something similar with smoking rates.4 Using the same social network data they had borrowed from the Framingham Heart Study, they studied smoking rates and, in particular, the decline of smoking over the length of the study. From the time the Framingham study began until the modern day, smoking declined gradually—in a way that has been the reverse of the obesity epidemic (which unfortunately might lend validity to the commonly held belief that smoking helps people lose weight).

  Th
e initial results for the effect of three degrees of influence on smoking showed it to be even greater than for obesity. If your friend smokes, the researchers found, you are 61 percent more likely to be a smoker yourself. If a friend of your friend smokes, you are still 29 percent more likely to smoke. And for a friend of that friend, the likelihood is 11 percent. The researchers could also see how, over time, quitting smoking increases the chances that others in your network will also stop. “When one person quits smoking, it has a ripple effect on his friends, his friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends,” they wrote of their results. “There is a kind of synchrony in time and space when it comes to smoking cessation that resembles the flocking of birds or schooling of fish.”5

  And it wasn’t just physical health affected by three degrees of influence. Christakis and Fowler also found this effect holding for our moods and mental health.6 Returning to the Framingham Heart Study participants, the pair found that examiners had asked participants a series of questions taken from the Center of Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Four of the twenty items to which participants respond on the CES-D have been shown in prior studies to correlate well with measurements of happiness. The questions ask each respondent how often in the past week he or she “felt hopeful,” “was happy,” “enjoyed life,” and felt that he or she was “just as good as other people.” Using these four questions, Christakis and Fowler could track how happy and unhappy people clustered together, and also how other people’s happiness might affect a participant’s own happiness. They found that participants were about 15 percent more likely to be happy if they were connected to another happy person. In addition, they were around 10 percent more likely to be happy if a friend of their connection was happy. For friends of friends of friends, the likelihood was nearly 6 percent.

  While an increase in happiness of 6 percent from someone three degrees away being happy may not seem like all that much, Christakis and Fowler are quick to point out that studies suggest that an increase in income of around $10,000 has a 2 percent chance of increasing happiness. “So, having happy friends and relatives appears to be a more effective predictor of happiness than earning more money,” they wrote.7 Since the “hat-trick” of their findings about social networks and the spread of influence, additional published research has supported their findings, in domains as diverse as political beliefs, innovative ideas, financial panic, and even suicide.

  Throughout this book, we’ve examined how social networks operate and how they create opportunities in work and in life. We’ve seen how weak ties and degrees of separation keep you more connected than you might think. We’ve seen how some individuals can navigate a collection of relationships far larger than you may imagine to be manageable, and also how you can dramatically grow the number of your own connections (or appear to already have a dramatic number of connections). We’ve discovered that the relationships among silos, clusters, and new and unlikely connections are more nuanced and complex than many people assume. And we’ve seen how we tend to be drawn to areas of the larger network that we’re more comfortable and familiar with, even when making connections in those areas is not necessarily in our best interest. Now the findings from Christakis and Fowler and all of the researchers they influenced offer us one final lesson—and perhaps the most important one.

  Social networks certainly have value because of the potential connections they can unlock, but they also have value because of their influence on ourselves. More than just influencing the people around you to help you gain social capital, social networks enable the people around you to influence you in positive and negative ways we’re only now becoming aware of. You aren’t just influenced by your friends and by friends of friends. Who you have become as a person, in whatever career you have chosen, was influenced by the network around you—and around your friends, and around friends of your friends—most likely without you even being aware of it.

  We don’t have a network; rather, we’re embedded inside a massive network that we must learn to navigate. Doing so requires paying attention to who is in your network and recognizing that how your network works matters for issues much larger than just finding that next client or landing that next job. Social networks aren’t just transactional, and they never were. They’re developmental. Your network is influencing you, and so you better begin influencing your network. Navigating your network deliberately—making choices about who your friends are and being aware of who is a friend of a friend—can directly influence the person you become, for better or worse.

  Your friend of a friend is your future.

  Going Further

  For further study of the science of networks and best practices when building and strengthening connections, I have created a collection of extra resources, including full-length interviews with several people profiled in this book, videos, and recommended readings. In addition, I’ve compiled a workbook of the exercises outlined at the end of each chapter. Because of the changing nature of technology, I will continue to keep these resources updated on my website with the most valuable and relevant information.

  All of these resources are freely available at my website, http://www.davidburkus.com/resources.

  Acknowledgments

  Every good book requires a good team, and every good team requires a good network. It’s your decision as to whether or not this was a good book, but I can tell you that the people who shaped it were a great team. I am fortunate in that I have had the chance to meet, and work with, so many great people in writing Friend of a Friend:

  Rick Wolff, my editor, who caught the idea quickly and helped shape it into reality, as well as Rosemary McGuinness, Lisa Glover, Cindy Buck, Taryn Roeder, Bruce Nichols, and everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  Giles Anderson, my agent, who regularly talks me out of the bad ideas and into great ones.

  Tom Neilssen, Les Tuerk, Cynthia Seeto, Adam Kirschenbaum, and all the folks at BrightSight Group for their help in finding a stage (or stages) for these ideas.

  Several great minds who assisted me with amazing insights and who helped me—and continue to help me—spread the word about Friend of a Friend: Tim Grahl, Jeff Goins, Ryan Holiday, Becky Robinson, Ashley Bernardi, and Tracey Lucas.

  The amazing people with amazing stories who made themselves available to me for interviews: Andrew Davis, Jon Levy, Chris Schembra, Whitney Johnson, Jayson Gaignard, Jordan Harbinger, Brian Uzzi, and Scott Harrison.

  The fascinating minds who helped me shape the stories and ideas in this book: Tom Webster, Tamsen Webster, Mitch Joel, Clay Hebert, and Bret Simmons.

  Two amazing clusters I found myself in during the writing of this book—private groups of business authors who became such a valuable resource that C. S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway would be jealous. You know who you are.

  My research assistants Brendan Campagna and Will Cook, who made this project easier, but not as easy as Reagan Kingsley made it thanks to his tireless photocopying.

  My chief of staff, Neha Ghelani, who kept telling me what to stop doing so that I could find the time to do this.

  The faculty and staff of Oral Roberts University, particularly the College of Business and Dr. Rebecca Gunn, who probably proofread this manuscript more than I did.

  And my wife Janna and boys Lincoln and Harrison, the most important friends that I know.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (New York: Viking, 2013).

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  2. Ibid., 48.

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  3. Ibid.

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  4. Jessica Shambora, “Fortune’s Best Networker,” Fortune, February 9, 2011.

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  5. Adam Rifkin, “Networking for Success,” Startups.co, https://www.startups.co/education/lessons/networking-for-success.

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  6. Adam Rifkin, “The Basics of Power Networking,” LinkedIn, August 6, 2013, https://www.linked
in.com/pulse/20130806141819-8244-3-important-things-to-be-mindful-of-as-you-build-your-network.

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  7. Rifkin, “Networking for Success.”

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  8. Ibid.

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  9. “All advice is autobiographical” has been attributed to many people, but it’s most often attributed to Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (New York: Workman, 2012), 1.

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  10. Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, and Maryam Kouchaki, “The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty,” Administrative Science Quarterly 59, no. 4 (2014): 705–735.

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  11. George P. Bush and Lowell H. Hattery, “Federal Recruitment of Junior Engineers,” Science 114, no. 2966 (1951): 455–458.

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  12. Rob Cross and Robert J. Thomas, “Managing Yourself: A Smarter Way to Network,” Harvard Business Review 89 (2011): 149–153.

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  13. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).