Author, professor, and organizational psychologist David Burkus leads a deep dive into the power of networking, exploring weak and dormant ties, structural holes in networks, social capital, navigating "multiplexity", and the TRUTH behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

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David Burkus is here. His book's called Friend of a

Friend. So David, welcome back to the show.

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Well, let's do this. So tell me so friend of a friend.

It's based on the science of human behavior and not on rote

networking advice. So what does that mean exactly?

This is not a new topic, right? We know this is

important. We know we've heard the phrases, your network is

your net worth, right? And all of those sort of phrases. And

yet, most of what we're consuming is what I would call

networking advice, right? And it's, someone's advice on here's

how to give the perfect elevator pitch, or how to introduce two

people. And it's good stuff. I mean, some of it, you know, How

to Win Friends and Influence People, is a perennial. It's

classic, right? So it's good stuff, but it's usually it's one

person's advice, right? And that one person can sometimes be

different than you, that some one person can have different

experiences than you, etc. And a lot of people take that advice

and then they go to the event, or they go to that thing where

they're trying to meet new people. They try and put that

advice into practice, and then they feel weird and sleazy and

inauthentic and well, like No wonder you feel inauthentic.

You're trying to be someone else, you know, by doing their

thing. So I'm trying to take a little bit different track,

which is for the last 50 or 60 years, scientists from a variety

of fields, mathematics, but also behavioral science, behavioral

science, behavior, economics, sociology, etc, have been

studying how networks actually work, how, if A is connected to

B and B is connected to C, how are c and A's relationship, and

what, what's going on in sort of the broader network. And so the

the big ideas, I think most people need to learn less of

someone else's advice and need to learn more about the network

that they're already a part of, and get a better map on that and

then respond accordingly. I mean, and network is not

something you have, and networking is not necessarily

something you do, like you already exist inside of a

network. There's one network, 7.4 billion people strong and

counting. But then whatever industry you're trying to sell

to or be a part of, whatever community that you're engaged in

that's already a network. And the better strategy is to figure

out, Where am I in this, who am I already connected to? Who do I

need to be connected to? How can I chart a path from from me to

them, etc? And when you when you start to do that, it looks a

whole lot less like running around trying to just add people

to your contacts on LinkedIn or email addresses under your

phone, and looks a whole lot more like mapping the community

that you're a part of, so you can start providing value to

that community and letting that value come back to you. And you

know, a lot of us, when we think about growing our network, we

immediately go to the sort of strangers approach, right? I'm

gonna go try and meet new people, whether that's at an

event or whether that is cold calling, whatever is. I'm gonna

try to meet new people, as opposed to knowing that inside

of the network that we're already a part of, there are

people that we know but we haven't talked to in a while. We

call these in network science the weak or dormant ties.

There's people that are warm referrals. They're one degree of

separation out from us, and we can be introduced to them. In

fact, that probably the funniest study in the entire book is

looking at Is there truth behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and

so and what happens is people train and connect, try and

connect one actor to another actor through Kevin Bacon in six

steps or less. And it's possible, it's also possible to

do it without Kevin Bacon. In fact, there's actually nothing

special about Kevin Bacon. He's a fluke of history in terms of

being connected. He's the 669th most connected person in

Hollywood. But it's good news for all of us. Right? What it

suggests is that if you think about you're not you may not be

in Hollywood, but if you think about your industry or your

geography as a network, you don't have to have this

incredible, super connectors network. You're already probably

one or two degrees of separation out from everyone that you need

to meet and get to know. It's just a matter of knowing what is

my path to them, who could introduce me to them, etc.

That's that's a much better strategy than thinking about

like, Okay, I need to just add as many new contacts to my to my

app as possible. It's much more about going, Okay, I need, I

know, I need these types of people. How can I get better

connected to them?

Yeah, is there anything specific that we should be doing

with that information, or is it just more of like it's about the

mindset shift of going just nurture, spend time nurturing

what you have, and work that not building a new network?

So I would say that's the first part. The

second is, as you're nurturing the connections you already

have, I coach a lot of people to get in the practice of asking

the question, Who do you know in blank, with blank being whatever

industry sector segment that you want to get to know more of now

that's different than what most people will do if they find out.

Usually, they'll wait till they find out that they have a

connection to that one person, that amazing person that's going

to fill their quota for the quarter, or going to introduce

them to the Hollywood executive that's going to get them in a

feature film. Right? We're. When we think about that, maybe we

even like we don't even know we LinkedIn stock, and then it

tells us we have this connection. Then we go to that

one person and we beg for an introduction. A better approach

is to sort of systematically be asking contacts we already have,

Hey, who do you know? In blank, whatever that segment is, and

let them come up with not just one person, but a list of names.

Usually, that list of names is going to be people they would be

comfortable introducing you to, and when you're doing that to

five or six different people and the same two or three names come

up, that's a strong signal, in terms of the network, that

that's the right person for you, and that that person is also

probably different than the one that you thought you needed to

get connected to. I mean, if there's 7.4 billion people in

the world, the likelihood that the person you think is going to

transform your business is also the person that really is going

to transform your business. It's pretty small, so it's better to

have a very open edge mentality of I'm trying to explore the

fringes of the network in its totality, and then we can figure

out who are the right people to get connected to.

Yeah. You talk about networking events. There is a

term that you introduce called multiplexity.

Yeah, yeah. And the way to think about network

Uh huh. There's a concept again here in the book that you

meetings is sort of like adding fuel to the fire of doing this

warm lead thing anyway, right? If you go, you're going to

accelerate that. But what a lot of people do is they run around

and they ask, in my opinion, the wrong question they ask. So what

do you do? Which it sounds like? It's a great question, because

it sounds like it cuts out of the small talk and gets to the

heart of it. But there's a 12. I call it a $12 word,

multiplexity. And what it is in network science is it's

essentially a realization that even though a might know B,

there are multiple different ways in which people can know

each other. So when we have just one thing in common or one

reason to connect, we call that a uniplex tie, right? So when

it's just work related, that's a uniplex tie, if we work

together, but our kids go to the same elementary school, and we

also see each other at the gym. That's a multiplex tie. There's

multiple different contexts in which we see each other, and the

research strongly suggests that you will build a better and

deeper relationship with someone faster if you're building

multiplex ties. So we go back to this question. So what do you

do? The problem with that is, you're at a networking event,

especially you're in a situation where the context is sending a

strong signal that we're supposed to talk about work. And

then when you ask, so what do you do? You send a strong signal

that that's what I'm interested in talking to. The context is

going to shift your conversation to work eventually. Anyway, so I

advise people lead with a little bit different question, right?

Something that's open ended, something that they can explore.

So this could be anything that feels natural but explores some

other dimensions. So what excites you right now? Where did

you grow up? I actually like to ask who's your favorite

superhero, just because you can learn a lot about somebody when

talking about superhero, but anything that explores them from

another aspect. I mean, humans are multifaceted creatures,

right? And the way that you build a deeper relationship,

stronger with them is is to be multi fascinated by the

different elements of them. You get to know them better on

multiple different levels. And you do that, I think, by

starting with a little bit different question. It might

sound like small talk, it might sound trivial, but you're

exploring other possible avenues and things you might have in

common. And when you come back to work, you will have a deeper

relationship, a stronger level of trust, etc, than if you just

focused in on work related things. The key is you also have

to be legitimately interested in the other person, right? Which

is part of being a decent human being, but, but if you are, then

there's no reason to stay within those guide rails that we think

we're supposed to do of the so what do you do? Let's exchange

business cards. Let's only think about each other in a work

context. The other thing is that as you go throughout your whole

the longitude of your whole career, you might actually find

that your personal friends, the people that are connected to you

for sort of non work reasons, end up becoming work

relationships. And in friend of a friend, we tell the story of

Whitney Johnson, who's a brilliant thinker, a good friend

of mine. Whitney's biggest sort of thing, before she went as a

writer, speaker, thinker, was she worked for an investment

firm called Rose Park advisors started by Clayton Christensen,

the brilliant mind behind disruptive innovation. How did

she get that job? Well, she was working in Wall Street, but she

got that job because she was serving on a committee at church

with Clay Christensen. He got to see how she worked in that

capacity. And that was the capacity that made him say,

like, you know what, I want you to lead my firm when I started

right, which is not you wouldn't think that at all, like no one's

job. Advice is, go start thinking about the people that

you know from church. But the truth is, people are multi

dimensional, and you have no idea how those connections are

going to pay off in the future. So be generally interested in

all of the facets of someone, and it will not only pay off

because you get to know them better and are a better human

being, it'll probably pay off in the long run, even in your

career as well. If a knows B and B knows C, C is more likely to

know a. In reality, too much. Transitivity is actually a bad

thing, like when you have too many of the same, close

connections, then you all kind of think alike, act alike.

Everybody knows each other, so that even the introductions and

referrals you're going to get are very similar to you. So

transitivity can actually be a bad thing. We need some of it

because we have to have close connections, but we also have to

monitor what's my how much time am I spending with the same few

people versus with the people that are further out in my

network that I'm sort of rewarming those ties?

talk about; structural holes.

Yeah. So this is probably one of my favorite

insights from the whole world of network. Science. Structural

holes refers to networks between. We just talked about

transitivity. That leads to sort of clustering. People tend to

cluster off, right? So they cluster off by industry. They

cluster off by ideology, like political ideology. They cluster

for a bunch of different reasons. And what that creates

over time is it's almost like planets and space, right?

There's Earth and there's Mars, and in between there's nothing.

Well, sometimes there's the moon, but you know what I mean?

Like, it creates a gap, an empty space in the network. And it

turns out that the people who bridge that gap, who connect two

communities to each other, who allow who become sort of an

information flow between them, those are the people that end up

creating the most value for both of those communities, and the

people who generate sort of the most value for themselves,

because they're seen as that connector. And this is, you

know, if you think about this in a rudimentary level, we know

this in the sense of, like, if you work in sales, for example,

you have the group of sales people. That's a cluster, you

sort of community of practice. Then you have the target market

that you're you're working in. That's another but do we ever

think about, okay, what are the other clusters that are kind of

connected to that target market, right? And some, some industries

do this really instinctively. Real estate agents, for example,

are great at knowing that they also need to be connected to the

title company and the mortgage office of people. But the same

thing works for sort of almost all of it. I cut my teeth my

first job out of school, I was a pharmaceutical sales rep, right?

And one of the advantages that I had was that there's drug reps

and then there's doctors, but there's also nurses, there's

medical device reps, there's a couple different clusters that

if I can start to bridge a lot of those structural holes, I can

create a lot more value for everybody. And that spills over

into my own career as well. You know, it's, it's social capital,

right? This is a term that describes the value when a

community is well, interconnected versus

geographically dispersed, but also it's the value that the

person doing that spills over into that person doing the

connecting, right? And, you know, I think the big takeaway,

like TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE, is that, how can you be that

person, right? What is the community that doesn't exist,

that needs to exist that would help your career, help your

clients, help people that are doing something similar to you?

You've got to go build that on the small scale as well. Because

one of the things that we know from the research on structural

holes and on social capital is that there is not a spillover

effect, right? If you're the broker, there's a huge value

that's created for both communities and for you. If

you're one degree of separation from that broker, none of that

value spills over, right? It doesn't affect your career. Just

because you know the person connecting, you have to be the

person connecting. Where can I build that little bit of a

community? Where can I connect to communities? Where can I be a

broker, even in the small scale? Because it's not enough to just

rely on other people to always be giving you those

introductions, but you have to be that person that's actually

connecting. And everybody can. This is not an introvert versus

extrovert thing. This is not a How long have I been in my

career thing? Everybody can begin to pay attention to the

network that exists and start to connect groups and communities

and even just individual people closer together that creates

value for that network, and it will spill over to you in turn.

What I love about the term social capital too is it works

just like any other capital. It compounds over time, so you've

got to make the little investments in it. You can't

just start withdrawing from it right away, like I can't buy a

mutual fund and then go I'd like to withdraw $100,000 from it.

Doesn't work that way. I have to actually have invested that

amount of money first before I can do it. And networks, you

know, they work the exact same way. And really, I mean, if I'm,

if I'm going to be a little bit braggadocious, this is the big

theory of the book too, which is, let's try and connect these

two communities, the people that study networks and the people

who need to know how to network better. It's not just advice.

It's, hey, I'm just trying to be that connector to, well, here's

the evidence based community that backs up all of the things

that you're

Yeah. How do you know, like you said, Kevin Bacon is

the 669 connected person in Hollywood. What's the process

that y'all are doing to come up with something like that?

Okay, so, so in that, in that specific

situation, the way that the researchers did it was they

basically took the data from Internet Movie Database and

basically were saying, If you acted together in a movie,

that's a connection, right? And so they can explore it's a very

sort of big data thing, right? Actually, Facebook, by the way,

does the exact same thing. I know we're in a bit of a data

privacy and Facebook, but they actually, almost every year

release a study that shows, based on the number of

connections you have, like, how many bridges does it take to

connect everyone in the Facebook community? And while it might be

six degrees of separation for the 7.4 billion people who who

are out there, for the 2 billion that have a Facebook account,

it's actually only four introductions. So it sort of

shrinks it. So you look at it when we're saying Kevin Bacon is

669 it's because of the sheer sort of number of connections

that he has. He ranks 669 there's, there was a, I think

the most connected one, if I remember right, was just sort of

an actor that had been in a bunch of different genres, but

not as a feature actor. So just sort of rotating around, but

you're building all of those relationships. The thing that's

most fascinating to me is that you don't necessarily have to be

that number one person. Even someone with as terrible a

network as Kevin Bacon can create all the value in the

world from connecting multiple different people and have that

affect his career too. I mean, the guy's actually been in a

visa ad about Six Degrees of Kevin Macon, right? All because

of this thing that just happened, even though he wasn't

the most connected. So everyone has this potential. You don't

have to be that super extroverted guy who knows how to

work the room type person. We all have that potential. We just

need to pay a little bit more attention to the network that's

around us and then respond accordingly. Actually, we dive

into some of the research on really most of these online

tools, whether it be LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or what have

you, most of them are only really effective to the extent

that they're a supplement for your existing offline network,

not a replacement for right? So it's great to do it. It's great

to jump into LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups and interact.

You also have to sort of be finding ways to make that

connection a bit more personal before it gets really valuable

there. We all know those people that spend a little bit too much

time on it and not enough time, like doing whatever the hard

work of getting in front of people is, we tell ourselves

that, oh, I'm building my network. I'm just saying, like,

No, you're not. You're just posting articles on LinkedIn and

calling that network and like, That's not. That's a great

supplement to help you with connections, but it is not a

replacement for the old school ways, and it's interesting in

the age of technology and all this data, that that's what we find.

If somebody's out there listening right now, is in the

spirit of the action catalyst podcast, what is the first thing

that you would have them take action on, in terms of

implementing everything that they are are learning here and

what we're talking about?

The first thing I would probably want them to do

is in line with a little bit of what we talked about, of what we

talked about with the research on weak ties, which is, I want

you to think of five people that you haven't talked to in six

months to a year, and I want you to do the work of reaching back

out to them, engaging them in a conversation. You have my

permission to wait till you find a relevant reason to do it, but

you don't have my permission to ignore making the list. Get that

list made, put it in front of you, and when that you start to

think about them, or you read an article that they'd be

interested in, or you see them post something online about what

they're up to, that's your reason. That's your ramp to go

back and reconnect with them and focus in on that first, because

it's more comfortable, but it's hugely beneficial to not just

you the overall network.

All right, my friends, David Burkus is who you're

listening to. DavidBurkus.com and we wish you all the best.

Oh, thank you so much, and thank you so much for

having me and for sharing me with your community. I really

appreciate it.