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.

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!

People are our product

I can see why social media is so compelling for most. We have a kind of herd instinct — well, it’s certainly not a true herd instinct in the sense of cattle, but we are fairly gregarious, us humans. It’s almost like our instinct to return to a group for security is being triggered all the time. It rewards us in the same way each time we are exposed to it, and when we aren’t we are reminded of the feeling. We have a kind of itch inside that prompts us, whenever there isn’t any overtly engaging conscious stimulation, to turn around and catch up with what the herd is doing. In past times, this may have involved going down the pub or similar venue. Going to a church or something like that. Going to the beach or a park or somewhere that affords “promenading”. The phone or tablet we carry is a constantly alluring gateway to get back to the crowd again for our regular hit of validation.

Even in shopping centres and tube stations, people standing on the right on the up escalator will simply look at the people standing on the right riding the down escalator, and vice versa. We like to look at each other, be with each other and discern differences in each other. We get a lot of pleasure from just looking at another human being — it’s obviously of value. There are even entire magazines devoted to looking at people. And television programmes. And films in the cinema. We value other people, their presence and existence makes us feel good.

In fact, that is precisely the point we should be taking to heart and embodying as the core of our businesses and products and endeavours — that people are effectively the product. People are our product. All of us. We are our product. We make stuff, for other people. We do stuff, for other people. We fix stuff and say stuff and squeeze stuff and show stuff — all for other people. People are who we connect to in our social networks, people are our societies. Our product is effectively nothing but people.

We offer value to each other — or at least, we should if we want to be successful, and we can measure our success by the connections we are rewarded with, and how influential we become within our networks. Maybe in addition there’s some kind of transactional reward involved, featuring temporally decoupled representational stored effort tokens, or maybe not. But that isn’t the main point. The value we gain is that of connectivity and agency within the network. If we offer value we may be rewarded with connectivity that affords network  fitness. One person connects to us, if they like what we offer, good, but if they don't they can pass the connection on to another and if they pass the connection on and so on, this builds our influence and allows our reach to extend. One person passing the good word on to another is how reputations are built, and the reputation stays or persists much longer than any set of connections in your network. We’re not really building networks, then. We’re really building reputations, and the way that we do this is by using the network as a substrate upon which our reputation grows.

What is a network? Scale-free networks

Previously I mentioned Preferential Attachment (the “rich get richer” phenomenon of some networks) which explains why popular nodes in a network become highly connected, and are highly connected because they are popular, and are popular because they are highly connected, etc. We see this on the Internet as things either go viral or things basically don’t move at all, plummeting to obscurity and beyond! It happens with people, some of us are highly connected, some are effectively islands, and most have just the average amount of connections. However, we may be connected to highly connected people on social networks, such as the Fry, the GaGa, the Kutcher types. Those superstars tweet it all and get retweeted by so many followers to their followers in turn, and the cycle is thus reinforced.

However, we could be being fooled here, as the size of the connected population is huge. Our intuition is that one follower may be fairly easy to gain, two followers must be twice that much work, ten followers, ten times that time and effort. A hundred thousand followers must take more than a lifetime to achieve!

How old are you? More than likely somewhere in the range of 20s to 70s, with a few outliers outside of this range. It’s rare to encounter someone older than 100, it is predicted that the first 150 year old person has already been born. Maybe. Maybe in the distant past a person did reach 150 but nobody wrote it down. Maybe H5N1 will mutate into human to human transmissible form soon and wipe out two thirds of the worlds overpopulation. Who knows? The point is, we’re used to a certain range of ages, and to find someone over a century is unusual. We never encounter a person over a thousand years old. Or a hundred thousand years old. We never encounter a person taller than the tallest building. We never encounter a person several thousand times more intelligent than average. What about strength? What about shouting loudest? What about jumping highest?

These parameters are kind of within “human scale”. We’re used to thinking about a kind of tangible scale, expecting measurements to fall within certain familiar boundaries, and applying a linearity to these dimensions. A ten year old took ten years to get there, a thirty year old, three times that much! I dug a hole 1 metre deep in a day, in ten days it was 10 metres deep. And so on.

However, in some networks, we experience an alternative dimensionality of Scale-Free networks. These are networks in which certain dimensions might have a mean of a certain value but it’s easy to find a few instances of crazy escalation up into the sky. That’d be like walking around and seeing most people about the age of a human, but now and then meeting someone that was around in the Cretaceous era. This is a scale-invariant situation — there’s no human scale to it any more. The results might be said to follow a power law distribution or Pareto distribution. Superstars getting insane amounts of connections in social networking while the rest of us will never get beyond a few thousand (or a few, in many cases). The spread of the World Wide Web and the quantity of websites on it. The relative growth of wealth of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, compared to the growth in earning power of all those in the same class as those people at school.

Most people work in a job and get paid. The job requires a certain amount of work as the input, and in a fair situation, it pays somewhat under what you’re worth as a reward. Therefore we’re used to thinking about income in a way that has a linear relationship. I do a certain amount of work in a week, I get paid a certain amount of money in a week. Sounds fair? That’s how it is. So how is it we have examples of super-rich billionaires? Do they do vastly more work than you and I? I’ve only got 24 hours in a day, and so have they, so how do they get a hundred thousand times more work done than I can? It’s not fair. Why can’t we go to our boss and ask for a pay rise, of a hundred thousand times what we’re getting now? Sounds fair? Sounds fair to me.

What is a network? Connections mornings graphs

A short while ago I posed a fairly straightforward question — “What is a network?” — except it’s not straightforward at all. It’s an overloaded word — a word that does multiple duties according to the context.

Except that the contexts these days are so wide as to overlap a lot of the time, hence the clarity and focus of the meaning is diffused. Everybody knows what we mean by ‘network’ — but not many people have a clear and precise definition. It’s one of those words which we see and nod and say to ourselves “yep, networking – I know what that is”. I usually find that if a person can’t clearly explain something to someone else (let’s say, to a Martian that’s just landed) then that person probably doesn’t actually know it at all — they merely think they do.

In the case of networks this is of course an easy illusion — we’re all on the Internet, we know that’s a network, we therefore know what a network is. Those in jobs might have a desk with computer on with a Cat5 cable coming out the back of it and off into a mysterious hole in the skirting board. Equally mysterious people come round to fix your network and tell you why stuff can’t be installed on the computer.

Even before the Internet people have been saying that business is all about ‘networking’. Okay, I’ll bring the Cat5 cable. Oh, not that sort of networking. What then? I need to ‘hook up’ with other people face to face, to “network” with them. Much time was spent in uncomfortable rooms in offices, trying to be well-behaved and impressive to strangers, forcing the act of ‘networking’ to happen so you could say you’ve ‘networked’. Even more time was spent in restaurants and rather comfortable pubs, also apparently ‘networking’.

Networking in the business context is simply turning up face to face where there are others that have also turned up? Networking is simply turning up? Is that the driver behind that manic willy-waving contest of arranging networking meetings to compel one to turn up even earlier than sanely comfortable and pretending that it’s normal and that we’re not only awake but somehow productive as a result?

Networks are very interesting in ways which most of us are not thinking of when we think of networking. For example, in 1736, Leonard Euler drew an interesting diagram, of bridges. I won’t go into it here, that link explains the background. The resulting diagram forms a chart or “graph”, which has blobby nodes and connecting arrows on. The node we would come to call a “vertex”, the arrow would become known as an “edge”, so graph theory is all about edges and vertexes (okay, “vertices” if we have time to be grammatically correct).  If a vertex has more than one edge touching it — in other words, if a node has more than one arrow connecting to it — then we refer to that number as the number of “degrees” that node has.

That’s where the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation” comes from, by the way. The exact number of six is not necessarily true – it depends on the particular population, not the whole world in one go. But it’s kind of true enough to give us the understanding of social connectivity we see in Twitter, Linked-in etc. You might be connected to me. I might be connected to a bunch of other people. Each of those may in turn be connected to other groups of people. Someone in one of those groups might also be connected to me somehow. It happens. These first-degree, second-degree and even third-degree connections are quite close to us.

One of the problems with having a tight, regular and uniform networking group, especially all first and second degree connections, is that news spreads rapidly and if anything happens, everyone in the immediate degrees of your group get to know about it all pretty quickly. This might seem good, but the downside of everyone knowing what everyone else knows is that there’s less opportunity for variation. There’s less likelihood of individual thinking in solutions, and less actual opportunity availability— less than you’d think. I’ll explain this in a later post.

However, not many people would dispute that if you want success, you’re not going to find it by yourself. You’ve got to get out and get with other people. Success does not open your door and walk into your living room, getting in the way of the television as it passes in front. You get out and go to it. That’s why we all prize the idea of networking, because of the perceived value it can offer. I just wish more people knew in detail what they mean by networking when they talk about it. It’s far from intuitive.