The Magic of Networks: Bigger Is Not Better!

It's not about size, but about quality.

Rob Cross often reminds us that it's not what we know, but whom we know.  The fact is that those of us with top-drawer networks are dealing with a lot of magic.  As Cross writes in an HBR Blog, there's a great deal of difference in networks. 

Work since the 1970s shows that people who maintain certain kinds of networks do better: They are promoted more rapidly than their peers, make more money, are more likely to find a job if they lose their own, and are more likely to be considered high performers.

The secret, or the magic of networks has never been about size.  Indeed, building mammoth Rolodexes or Facebook accounts can be harmful to your health and your performance. 

The people who do best tend to have ties with those people who are not connected to each other.  If you've got a network like that, you're more likely to hear about unique ideas--ideas that don't echo around in others' networks. 

Those are the ideas that will enable you to piece together really fruitful opportunities.  I detailed this stuff in a blog on social networking back in 2008, but thankfully Rob Cross pushes the same buttons regularly.  

In one post, Cross reported on networks and innovation in social media.  Just like face-to-face networking, they found that innovativeness has nothing to do with the number of bookmarks accessed or even the number of people collected from social media.  Instead, the more innovative employees had what Cross labels as bridging ties--ties that connected them to other employees who were themselves not connected.   

Weak social ties, not the strong ones, are key. They are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks as well as the transmission of information through these networks. It's counter-intuitive, but novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know.  Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information. 

So we want to focus our electronic links not on people we have known forever, or on those who are all spending time in the same interactions.  These echo networks are those that you create through your friends. They  follow the standard social rule: "birds of a feather flock together. In short, bigger is not better. Amazing how difficult it is to sell this fact.

The magic of new ideas will come from connections into different networks.