Friend of a Friend . . ._Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career
Page 24
network density, 100
network navigation, 46–49
network size, 113–14, 147–48
networking
about this book, 10–11
vs. activities, 174–80
feelings towards, 5–7
influences from, 171, 212–15
as learned skill, 4
misconceptions, 5, 7–8, 161
success and, 7–8
as a web, 4
Newman, Mark, 132–33
Nixon, Richard, 163
nodes, 116, 130–32
normal distribution, 114
Norris, Alexander, 195
Norris, Elizabeth Ann, 195
Norris, Olivia, 195
Nosek, Luke, 93
nTag, 182–83
O
Obama, Barack, 165
obedience study, 38–39
obesity, 211–12
old friends. See weak ties
106 Miles, 4
online practices
brokers, 70
clusters, 89–90
connectedness, 51
homophily, 173
majority illusion, 156
multiplexity, 208
preferential attachment, 140
shared activities, 190–91
super-connectors, 122
teams, 105
weak ties, 34
online social networks, 148
Opel, John, 193–94
opportunities
from Levy’s Influencers Dinners, 176–78
network navigation, 46–49
See also weak ties
Oracle of Bacon, The (website), 37, 43
organizational charts, 100–103, 185–86
organizational misfits, 62–63, 66, 96, 200
P
Parker, Sean, 83
passion, 184, 187, 189
passport experiment, 39–40
patents, 97
PayPal, 93–95
PayPal Mafia, 92–97, 99–100
peer pressure, 150, 154–55
Pelosi, Nancy, 159–60
perceptions
of election, 158–62
of fighting, 15–16
of liaison officers, 66–67
of networking, 5–7
who you know, 171
See also majority illusion
performance
multiplexity, 200–203
networking and, 9
of UFC/MMA endeavor, 17–18
personal networking, 6–7
Peruggia, Vincenzo, 136–38
physical capital, 9
Picasso, Pablo, 75, 136
Pixar Animation Studios, education, 185–89
podcast, Planet Money, 168–71
podcast, The Art of Charm, 120
podcast, This American Life, 168–71
Podsakoff, Nathan, 200–203
popularity
majority illusion, 143–46, 147–51
Mona Lisa and, 135–38
song download study, 133–34
Pound, Ezra, 75
Powder Mountain, 83–84
power law, 114, 115, 120, 130–32, 148
practice. See exercises
preferential attachment, 123–40
defined, 131
exercises, 139–40
Gaignard’s Mastermind Dinners, 123–29
influence of, 138
Matthew effect, 130–32
Mona Lisa popularity, 135–38
phenomenon of, 129
popularity, 133–34
Presley, Elvis, 36
Procter, William, 195
Procter & Gamble, 195
productivity, silos and, 76
professional groups, 50–51
R
Rabbit, Michael, 148
Rabois, Keith, 92, 95, 96
Rahn, Will, 162
reactivation, of relationships, 22–26, 29–30
RealClearPolitics, 161
redistricting, 164
resources. See downloads; exercises
Reynolds, Patrick, 37
“rich ties,” 203
“rich-get-richer phenomenon,” 132
Rifkin, Adam, 1–4
Roepke, Ann Marie, 56
Rose Park Advisors, 206
Rosenthal, Jeff, 81–84
Ruef, Martin, 20–22
Rust Belt, 159, 161–63
S
Sacks, David, 93, 95
safety, silos and, 72–74
Salganik, Matthew, 133–34
Schembra, Chris, 178–80, 184
Schwartz, Jeremy, 81–84
scripts, 183
segregation, 165
self-similarity principle, 181, 183, 188
Seligman, Martin, 56
September 11, 2001, 73–74
Sequoia Capital, 92, 96
Sequoyah, 59–60
747 Club, 178–80
shared activities principle, 174–91
education at Pixar, 185–89
exercises, 190–91
Levy’s Influencers Dinners, 174–78
vs. networking, 180–85
Schembra’s 747 Club dinners, 178–80
self-similarity principle, 181
silos, 64–65
advantages of, 76
Italian glassmakers, 71–72, 74
safety and, 72–74
timing of, 77–81
writers and, 75–76
See also clusters; multiplexity
Silver, Nate, 159
Simmons, Russel, 93
“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (game), 36–37
“Six Degrees of Marlon Brando” (game), 37
“Six Degrees of Monica” (game), 37
six degrees of separation, 35–38, 39–40, 44–45, 46, 115
skills mastery, silos and, 76, 87
small-world effect, 41–45, 115
smoking, 212–13
social capital, 2, 9, 79
social media, 70
song-download study, 133–34
SpaceX, 96
spanning gaps. See brokers
Spencer, Graham, 1–2
Spiro, Jarrett, 98–99
Spotify, 83
stakes, 184, 189
Steiger, Rod, 43–44
Stein, Gertrude, 75, 81
“Strength of Weak Ties, The” (Granovetter), 20
Strogatz, Steven, 41–45
strong ties
CreativeMornings, 86
in garment industry, 80–81
innovation and, 21–22
vs. weak ties, 18–19
structural holes, 52–70
exercises, 69–70
filling, in military, 63–68
McGonigal’s video games anecdote, 52–57
research on, 58–63
See also brokers
success
brokers and, 60
networking and, 7–8
Sullivan, Jake, 160–61
Sullivan, Margaret, 162
“Summit at Sea” (conference), 83
Summit Series, 82–84
“SuperBetter” (game), 55, 56, 57
super-connectors, 106–22
average network size, 111–16
defined, 146–47
exercises, 121–22
Gaignard, Jayson, 123–29
Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment anecdote, 106–11
Harbinger’s network building, 116–20
Rifkin, Adam, 3
Swissmiss (blog), 85
T
Task Force, 63–68
Tattly, 85
teams, 91–105
company structures, 100–103
exercises, 104–5
PayPal Mafia, 92–97
short-term vs. long-term, 99
temporary nature of, 97–101
working together, 180–85
templates, 34, 51, 70, 90, 105, 122, 140, 157, 173, 191, 208
Tesla Motors, 96
Thefacebook.com, 152–54
Thomas, Robert, 8
Tickets Canada, 123–29
Tippingpoint Labs, 143–46
Tjaden, Brett, 36–37, 43
Tolkien, J.R.R., 75–76
trade associations, 50–51
transitivity, 77, 81
traumatic brain injury, 52–53
Travers, Jeffrey, 39–41
Trump, Donald, 158–63
trust
establishing between clusters, 65, 67–68
multiplexity, 193, 197–98
self-similarity principle, 181
strong vs. weak ties, 18–20, 23, 24, 25
Turtle, Brian, 35–38
Twitter, 3, 148
Tyson, Mike, 15
U
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), 14, 15
Uzzi, Brian, 79–81, 97–101, 181, 183, 185
V
value
brokers and, 68, 79
making introductions, 121–22
of new connections, 119
Venice’s glassmakers, 71–72, 74
video conferencing, 90
video games, healing and, 52–57
virtual meetings, 90
W
Walter, Jorge, 22–26
Warhol, Andy, 137
Warner Bros., 106–9
Wasserman, Lew, 109
water, charity for, 27–32
Watson, Glen, 36–37
Watts, Duncan, 41–45, 133–34, 166–67
weak ties, 13–34
CreativeMornings, 86
defined, 18
vs. dormant ties, 22–26
exercises, 33–34
Fertitta and White anecdote, 13–18
in garment industry, 80–81
Harrison charity: water anecdote, 27–32
innovation and, 20–22
job transition study, 19–20
online practices, 34
strength of, 20, 32
vs. strong ties, 18–19
White, Dana, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 19
“Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do” (Feld), 147
widowhood effect, 209
Williams, Charles, 75
Williams, Ev, 3
Winklevoss, Cameron, 152
Winklevoss, Tyler, 152
working together, 180–85
World Bank, 54
“World Without Oil” (game), 54
Wuchty, Stefan, 97
X
X.com, 94
Y
YouTube, 91–92
Z
Zuckerberg, Mark, 151–55
1
Outlaw Email
Corporate leaders across the globe are discovering that banning or limiting their employees’ access to email is making them more, not less, productive. Their experiences are matched by recent research findings that email hurts more than it helps.
WE SEND OVER 100 billion emails every day.1 And most of them are for business purposes.
You might call that daily deluge of electronic information a symbol of technological progress, but Thierry Breton, the CEO of the France-based technology company Atos SE, sees it differently. He likens that volume of emails to pollution—email pollution. When Breton realized that the constant stream of emails was distracting to both him and the people in his company, he took steps to eliminate what he believed were negative effects on company productivity.
In February 2011, Breton announced that he was banning email. In three years’ time, he wanted Atos to be an “email-zero” company. “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” Breton said in a public statement released through Atos’s website. “We are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”2
That statement is surprising for a variety of reasons. For one, Atos isn’t exactly anti-technology: the company is a leading information technology services firm. Atos isn’t a small start-up either: at the time of the announcement, the company employed over 70,000 people in more than forty offices around the world. But Atos’s massive size was actually what Breton saw as the reason for the communication clog. “The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business,” he said. “Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails.” Breton, likewise, isn’t exactly the model of a rogue start-up founder testing out wild new ways to work. Instead, he’s a middle-aged former minister of finance for France and a former professor at Harvard Business School. Needless to say, he’d put a lot of thought behind his assertion that “email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business.”
Breton actually adopted the zero-email philosophy for himself long before he announced it to the company. He’d stopped using internal email nearly five years earlier, when he was working for the French government, because he found it wasn’t helping him get his work done well.3 Breton found something similar with the staff of Atos, even if they couldn’t see the solution right away. Atos polled a sample of 300 employees and monitored the volume of their email. In just one week, the 300 employees sent or received over 85,000 messages.4 When the company surveyed employees, it found that the majority of them felt that they couldn’t keep up with their emails, that the time spent trying was time wasted, and that the effort to stay current with email kept them from dealing with more important tasks. Breton found that his employees were realizing the same thing he’d discovered years before. So he simply banned email.
Of course, Atos didn’t ban communication, and it didn’t even ban electronic communication. Instead, Atos tried to find a better tool for managing internal communication. The company bought another software firm called BlueKiwi and used its technology to build its own social network for the entire enterprise. The network was organized around 7,500 open communities that employees can join. These communities represent products, internal programs, and myriad other projects needing collaboration. Unlike email, these communities are totally transparent, so newcomers can see all of the communication about particular issues. Like email, conversations are threaded so that newcomers to the community can see the past history of the discussion. Unlike email, however, conversations are not digitally pushed to employees’ inboxes, interrupting their focused work time. Instead, employees can choose to enter the discussion on their terms.
The social network also makes it easier for employees to find needed experts, share knowledge companywide, and, most importantly, collaborate better. And the new system has dramatically cut down on internal email. To help its managers adjust, Atos even created training programs for more than 5,000 managers to teach them how to lead their departments and projects in a zero-email environment. The company also trained 3,500 “ambassadors” to provide training and support among their peers as they adjusted to the new system. Now fully converted to the new system, the company certifies projects and communication processes as “zero-email.”
The initiative appears to be working. Although Atos didn’t hit its target, a study conducted in 2014 by an independent firm showed that Atos’s email reduction efforts were progressing very nicely. By the end of 2013, Atos had certified 220 programs as “zero-email” and reduced overall email 60 percent, going from an average of 100 email messages per week per employee to less than 40.
More importantly, employees now report feeling far more productive and collaborative. Collaboration has been enhanced by the internal social network, which doesn’t distract employees by pinging messages to their inbox and actually provides a better-designed platform for group communication. Atos employees post in the company’s internal communities almost 300,000 times a month, and those messages are viewed nearly 2 million times per month. Most importantly, all of those views are by choice.
These email reduction efforts have been good for the company as well: Atos’s operating margin increa
sed from 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent in 2013, earnings per share rose by more than 50 percent, and administrative costs declined from 13 percent to 10 percent. Obviously, not all of these improvements were the result of banning email, but the correlation is certainly strong. So is the empirical evidence.
The Revolution Against Email
Thierry Breton isn’t the only technology leader openly criticizing email. Phil Libin, the CEO and founder of Evernote, feels that the problem with email is not just volume but also how that volume is dealt with. “A concept like an email inbox is harmful. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for productivity. Think about what your inbox is. Your email inbox is a list of things that you’re behind on, sorted in the wrong order. It’s not how you want to work,” Libin said.5 “Email is fine if you’re maybe getting two or three a day. It was never meant for anything like the volume we currently see.”
Jay Simons, the president of Australia-based software firm Atlassian, also thinks that the reason email is so damaging is that it’s used wrongly and too often.6 “We use it for so many things that it’s not really appropriate for. Email is really good at being a directive communications notifier,” he said. “If you’re expecting any meaningful discussion, email is probably not a great forum.”