Have more sex and get more money

Have I got your attention? Good. Getting other people’s attention is what propels most of the Internet. Actually, all of the Internet. There’d be nothing on the Internet at all otherwise. And elsewhere in the real world there’d be no advertising; no books written; no films made; no music recorded; no photographs taken; no television programmes; no news journalism; no paintings; no labour strikes and no terrorism. I want your attention because, well, not just the warm and cosy feeling of gratification and validation, which is the most direct immediate result, but also via a more circuitous route of increasing the probability of being able to offer something of value to you, and thus increasing the risk of being rewarded appropriately in the long run.

One of the interesting things about the unintuitive nature of our networking relationships is not only that the quantity of connections follows a scale-free power-law progression, but also that the type of relationships matter somewhat too. In real life, our interpersonal networking tends to take two dominant directions — business or friendship relationships. Business relationships are often about provider / client differentials. Sometimes they’re about equal relationships, in which one side provides something that the other side is lacking in, and vice-versa — basically, acting as contra-operating provider / client relationships. Friendship relationships are complicated. There are several initial condition situations, and several strategy choices to run the relationship by.

The initial conditions may begin in the playground as “best friends” learning that people offer value and we can consume that value — but within a fairly innocent and basic notion of transactional value. As we grow up, we experience romance, which modifies our idea of value. Into adulthood, some get the hang of how those relationships can impact our social effect. We experience the extrinsic value of having a partner, that the relationship itself can have an effect on your network fitness. Hence, some people even collect relationships. Others may observe other’s relationships and hanker after similar situations without easily achieving anywhere near as many followers.

Perhaps more traction to escalate ones network fitness is gained through personal relationships than what we term as business relationships. This is not to say that one should attempt to have sex with as many partners as possible in order to widen one’s connections. One only has to look at cultures which consider baby mothers and absent fathers to be the norm. Those involved in such highly connected networks are not necessarily enjoying a high powered state of business success. It’s often quite the contrary, with more mouths to feed, limitations placed upon times and places, and consequently not accessing a rich range of rational choices for progress — like dragging an anchor.

Very often a partner is supportive and will believe in you when times are bleak. It’s tempting to think that if one partner in a relationship supplies such a lot of help, then why not simply increase the amount of relationships? However, the stability of one single relationship for a longer term may prove more valuable than the immediate benefits of a highly varied relationship scene, if for no other reason than long-term reputation. But this shouldn’t prevent being promiscuous in other associations that are not romantic. Perhaps the best way forward in business is having learned a lot about the value of interpersonal relationships, to go full circle and return to being a bit more like we were in the playground again, with networks of multiple “best friends” innocently evaluated by reputation, loyalty, and support.

What shape is your network? You’re wrong

What shape is your network? Do networks have shapes? People seem to think so. They’re referred to as “topologies” and you see the same sort of mentality in organisational charts. Similarly, your organisation’s org chart is lying to you. A blatant lie. It draws a picture — a graph of arrows and nodes, or vertices and edges — people believe it, yet it’s wrong. The topology of most organisations is a top-down hierarchy, in which the power is centred at the top and commands are passed down through levels of control and authority lower and lower reaching the workers at the bottom. On the “factory floor” or the “sales force” or “front line”. Whichever analogy describes best the people who spend all their time doing the applied work and none of their time commanding (or “managing”) subordinates. This is still a dominant topology for many organisations other than the very young startups, which pretend to be flat and equal, and the very trendy, which pretend to be informally mixed up and organically interconnected and equal, man. However, if you draw out the org chart of any organisation, it is a deceptive lie. Your org chart is lying to you.

Who is connected to who? The traditional and expected way of viewing this is by authority. Who can issue commands to who, who can sack or promote who, who pays who. Another way of viewing the situation is by who influences who, and viewed this way the connection graph looks totally different. Some people in an organisation are not influential at all. Even at the top. There are people at the top of an organisation that few even recognise as working there, most people don’t attach their name to their face, and what function they perform is a mystery. If they have any influence at all, it’s a generally vague ‘fear’ experienced from a distance instilled by association with certain offices that most people don’t go near. Apart from that quiet background-level impression, they have no specific influence at all. You can almost ignore those people. Without them, life would not be detectably different. However, your organisation’s traditional-style org chart is simply a map of fear — that’s all it is.

Then you have people at the top who everybody knows — their name, their aim, their personality — and although any interaction with them is definitely one-sided (they own the company, or can sack you, or promote you) it is at least reassuringly predictable and not such a mystery. You kind of know where you stand with those people, you know enough about them to transact usefully. They’ve publicised or made known all of the necessary information about themselves over the course of time as a social investment. However, it may often prove to be that the most influential people in an organisation, and therefore, where the most dynamic transactional value activity in the network takes place, is not at the top. It’s elsewhere, and could be anywhere — it doesn’t relate to your accepted org chart at all. We’re beginning to glimpse a different network graph altogether.

There are popular nodes in a network, and these become even more popular because they offer the richest connections to the most other nodes in one easy action. The people that everyone knows, the gossips through who all traffic travels. The people who act as interfaces between all the departmental networks in the organisational environment. Not just the hubs within the departments, but the circuses that connect the different departments and even the outside world.

Who sees everybody in the organisation? Who interacts with everybody? Not just a casual “hello” and “goodbye” but a useful transaction offering value, that bridges domains. Who are the circuses? These are often also the influencers. If they get a new type of phone, or wear a new fashion item, or use a new app, ride a new type of bike, or read a new book, or shop online through a certain site, or have their hair in a certain way, soon a few more people align themselves with these choices. Many people within and connected to the organisation gain value from these people who influence, and they afford credibility and reputation to these influential highly connected circuses. However, you won’t see any of that on an org chart. Essentially, if you’re an owner or founder or some other chief of an organisation and you think you’re the boss because you’re in the top area of your org chart, there’s a fair chance you’re wrong. Your  org chart is actually a map of fear, and it’s been lying to you all along.

Your morsels of value

What do I mean by network value? In a network, the popular nodes become even more popular, according to a “rich get richer” fashion known as “Preferential Attachment”. Previously I have used the example of the London Underground, although that is not a particularly good example in terms of dynamics, because the popular stations are interchanges. There is very little occasion for a new interchange to suddenly pop up at a station that hitherto was not an interchange. New stations don’t materialise that often, so the whole analogy proves a bit slow to visualise in action.

The network value of a vertex in a network, which is rewarded by affordability of opportunity to increase connections in a scale-free manner, is itself a complex parameter. What do I mean by value? Up to now, we’ve just been assuming we mean that we offer something, perhaps something unique or perhaps something appreciated or liked or funny or thoughtful or provoking or some other appealing lure. If a node in a network produces something no other node does, and if as coincidence would have it, other nodes in a network actually appreciate that product, then that’s what we’ve been imagining what I mean by “value” within a network. But this is quite subjective.

Lots of nodes, sorry, people, produce and present to the network more or less nothing. When they do, it might be of low importance such as mentioning that their cat rolled over. Or it might be something derived that they are simply passing on, like a retweet or a pasted-in motivational quote. Motivational quotes are a freely utilised currency. As far as I’m aware, Henry Ford, Bob Marley and Thomas Edison don’t actually have twitter or facebook accounts, what with the inconvenience of being dead and all that. Yet much of what they ever said in their lives is passed around freely. Not only as a way of cheering people up (or ‘motivating’ them), but packaging it as a kind of “you got that good feeling from me” emotional transaction.

As I say, a node that produces is not always offering value to the network. In a work environment, if someone farts, the value of their unique production is generally not appreciated or liked, nor does it give everyone else a good feeling. So you see, it’s subjective. What we consider value is often measured and quantified in terms of a qualitative effect on us. The more happy it makes us, the more value we assign to that direct contact on the network that packaged their output into tiny little morsels, nibble after nibble. We afford network fitness to them as a reward. But only if we calculate that they offer value to us, and this is purely in terms of how good it makes us feel at the time. It’s all very much instant gratification, there’s almost nothing long-term about this, and it doesn’t correlate with any true usefulness of the information, just how sweet it tastes to us.

Drowning in social networking

Who are all these people subscribing me or following me or whatever? I don’t know them and they don’t know me. The most they can possibly know about me is from my picture, profile and a quick look at the latest stuff I posted or tweeted or the videos on youtube that I make. None of those followers know what kind of a person I really am, nobody knows anything much about me unless you’re a long-term friend. However we all need to expand our connections, but the vast majority of those we connect to will turn out to be passively useless. Of course, you have no idea which ones those are, because someone connected to you may seem to be contributing nothing but they in turn may connect to someone else who connects to someone else, who, well, you get the idea. Distant and weak links are often valuable. Not all the time, but it happens.

The point is, these social networks are actually directed graphs, even though it doesn’t seem like it. There are people who tweet out or post out. There are people who don’t, or hardly ever, or when they do it’s about something mundane in their life such as their cat looking cute again. There are people who read these messages and people who ignore most of them. When you have a lot of followers and in turn you follow a lot, you can’t possibly spend all day reading it all, you’d get nothing done. Some people produce content on the social networks, some people consume content, some redirect, retweet or repost and act as hubs within their own networks. Some even act as circuses linking the hubs that they pay attention to, at the expense of discrete islands of nodes.

Therefore some information is going out from many nodes, some information is coming in to many nodes, and not all nodes balance this equally. The network value of a node is related to how actively it will process from input to output usefully to others (either reading it, or retweeting it, etc). If it does nothing, or just occasionally posts about the cat, it’s effectively just noise. However, as I stated, you can’t just remove all the first degree connections that seem useless, they may be connected further away to someone more useful —you simply never know.

A lot of this chasing followers in the hope of a sudden viral success of whatever it is we’re all about, reminds me of something. It reminds me of the last years of the 20th century when everyone was swapping banner ads on their web rings. It’s not actual productive work. Yes, it gets the word out there and an amount of that kind of promotion is a good ingredient, but it can’t take your whole day, day after day. If everyone did that, nothing would get made, grown, produced or fixed. My advice therefore is to concentrate far more on what it is that you produce that is of value, and less so on publicising it, otherwise you’ll get nearly nothing done in life. Turn your back, get on with whatever it is you actually do and make some more of it. Be productive. You can market it afterwards. Unless, that is, your whole productive output is structured only around social media “marketing”, in which case you’re effectively useless. But that can’t be the case, I’m sure you can actually do something that people are interested in experiencing.

Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!

The difference between achievement and success

What is achievement?

Achievement is where you push your envelope of potential, your boundary of potential, your horizon of potential, beyond what you thought you were capable of. However, it’s not just about putting in more effort — more hours worked or units processed. What counts more is how we have recognised problems, designed a specification for a solution, identified a solution that fits, and proceeded to implement it. A hole in the ground is a problem, we need to know the shape and size of the hole (the specification) and what to fill that hole in with (the solution), and then actually fill it in (the implementation).

In that case, what is success?

Success is where you are rewarded for promoting the transactional value of the product of your achievement to the market. A product of an achievement that reaches one person and offers value that benefits them is rewarded. The same product from the same achievement reaching a hundred people and offering value that benefits those, is also rewarded. However, each of those hundred people in turn might also be connected to another hundred, and each of those to another hundred, and so on. Consequently, the transactional response for the value you offer becomes your scale-free reward of network fitness. In other words, it comes back to you multiplied — and that’s how we do that.

Be a Circus — link the networks

You cannot simply engage solely in the activity of “marketing”. There has to be something to market. You have to have a product. This has to be created or generated or grown or picked or mined or recycled or otherwise obtained somehow. It seems to me that a lot of people are quite willing to do this “marketing” thing, in favour of attending to the creation or generation step. You can’t market nothing, you have to add something of value, and no, marketing marketing doesn’t count, that adds up to nothing. How much time should we spend making and creating, and how much time for publicising that we’ve made the stuff, or have the stuff or are the stuff? I suspect those that are attracted to the perceived benefits of this “marketing” activity are precisely the sort of people who simply don’t make things or create things or even fix things.

There are people who make and create and generate, and I include the people who also repair and upgrade and maintain. However, there is certainly another type of person who shuns the innate ability we all have to produce because they offer a different value. Instead, they act as what I will term “circuses” between hubs of people in a clique, topic domain or community. In the same way, some people in those groups of people — the trades, interest groups or organisations, act as hubs by earning respect and visibility through their value and expertise. At the hub and community level, many of the highly connected and visible hubs that exhibit high network fitness within their communities, are usually also producers and consumers of the specific topic they are involved in.

The hubs are effectively people who know about other people in a domain and what they like and require. Because of this value the hubs are rewarded with connection fitness, in that domain. Everybody goes into and out of that hub, and more so because of their connectivity. They become visible and popular within a domain. They are the hubs that everyone connects to. They know their stuff, they know their people, they know their people that know their stuff. High network fitness.

The circuses are a different type of people who know about other people across various domains along with what they produce, the value they offer, and where it can fit. They probably know quite little in detail about what happens in each specific community and domain and trade, but enough to carry a surface level conversation. Enough to get the inkling about it. Enough to be able to deal with the concept abstractly, but not from the inside. What they can do is hook up one concept with another. Know which plugs and sockets on the patchboard might prove useful to hook together. In fact, they often don’t even know that, they simply connect them anyway. If nothing happens, nothing happens, but otherwise, something might happen! And because of their highly connected network fitness, hooking together the diverse hubs themselves, they get significant scale-free magnitudes of rewards.

That’s probably how things work in life, so there you are: the secret, all yours — enjoy. Tweet this around in between your pictures of kittens, and let the world know what I’ve taught you today. Become a Circus!