By Uzzi and Dunlap
Harvard Business Review
December 2005, p 53
A means by which to think-through and plan one’s professional network is presented in this article. The key thoughts are:
- Sharing knowledge, not hording it, actually increases the value of it
- “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”—Linus Pauling; individual success is tied to being able to think in an interdisciplinary manner; diverse network ties are therefore vital to being innovative and competitive
- Most personal networks are highly clustered around one’s friends and associates, with many in the network already knowing one another; this is the self-similarity principle
- Create a table of who you know, who introduced you, and who you introduced them to; this will show you whether you have diversity in your network, and who your network brokers [see below] are
- The proximity principle, which holds that people tend to populate their network with those that they spend the most time with, may be overcome by applying the shared activities principle, leading one to thoughtfully join community, voluntary, service, sports, boards, charitable organizations, etc., so as to expand the circles of networking
- Identify your brokers or superconnectors—those who tend to introduce you to many others—and nurture those very key relationships
