How to Build Your Network – Part 1 of 2

“Strong personal networks don’t just happen at the watercooler. They have to be carefully constructed.”

I read a GREAT article thanks to a friend sharing the link. The article was published in the Harvard Business Review in December 2005, and I think it is an excellent short read. My review and notes are as follows:

If you were to ask a friend of yours who Paul Revere is, they would probably be able to recall the answer without difficulty or prodding. The real question is how many of your friends would be familiar with William Dawes? This is both a question in this article and it is brought up in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I am reading The Tipping Point now and will have a book review in the future. William Dawes and Paul Revere both rode out on the SAME night April 18, 1775 and sounded the alarm that the British were coming. Revere went north while Dawes headed south. Only Revere’s name continues to echo in history. Why is it that two men with similar educational backgrounds and social status would target towns with similar demographics but only Revere’s warnings were responded to?

Paul Revere was an information broker. An information broker plays a vital role in social networks. With technologies like facebook, twitter, brazen careerist, linked in, and others, I found this extremely intriguing. An information broker connects disparate groups of people. The reason Revere is so famous is that he himself was an information broker AND he got to each town’s information brokers. It was these people who then rallied the troops and pulled together all the disparate networks to bring everyone to bear arms against the British the next morning.

Now imagine that the information isn’t that the British are coming but about a new product or service. Got your attention? This is where I got excited and had flashbacks to my previous semester’s marketing course. When the information is not delivered to the right people, then our product or service will fail. Networks are the exact reason why some ideas become breakthroughs and others do not. This applies to whether you are a blog trying to capture some new viewers, or you have just come out with a new e-book that you would like to sell.

There are 3 advantages of a network:
Private Information
Acess to diverse skill sets
Power

1) Private Information – this is information that is gathered from personal contacts who can offer something unique that cannot be found in the public domain (ie: release date of a new product or service). Public information doesn’t give the competitive advantage like it once did. Therefore, private information can really give upper management an edge. However, this information typically is not verified by a third party so the value in it depends on how much trust exists in the network of relationships.

2) Access to a diverse array of skill sets – Expertise has gotten very specialized the last 15 years, but organizational, product, and marketing issues have become more interdisciplinary. This means that individual success is strongly tied to the ability to transcend natural skill limitations through others. You will be able to have a creative and unbiased view on issues through highly diverse network ties. A good example of this is Linus Pauling who is one of only two people to win a Nobel Prize in two different areas. He attributed his creative success to having diverse contacts. He said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” That is exactly what having access to a diverse array of skill sets can do for us.

3) Power – Organizations are getting flatter and power is shifting in the information brokers that stand ready to adapt to organizational changes. For most people their personal networks tend to be highly clustered. Moreover, an individuals friends tend to be friends with eachother as well. This is where brokers come in to be extremely powerful. Brokers connect all the separate clusters. They are the glue that ties the subnetworks together and in turn, stimulate both collaboration and exploit arbitrage among what would be independent specialists.

Do you see these advantages in your own personal/professional networks? What other advantages or disadvantages do you see in your networks?