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.

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? Fitness, Value, Tournaments

If you search for fitness models on the Internet you’ll find an impressive range of pretty young things who don’t stray far from a gym. They’re certainly nice people to look at, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. A fitness model from the network context is a way of describing how it grew to where it is now, or how it may have failed to grow, or what it may be likely to do next. The assumption is that the nodes in the network are competitive and will seek an increase in the degree of their connections at the expense of other nodes degree connection. The Bianconi + Barabási model expresses this mathematically, which means that I won’t go into it here right now. Or anywhere. Ever.

I would suggest, however, a further parameter to this model. The existing facet of fitness could be viewed as intrinsic but let’s add another parameter that I might call ‘value’, which could be seen as an extrinsic dimension. If a node offers ‘value’ then it is given ‘fitness’ in terms of affordability of degree connections. Either way, the Barabási-Albert model of preferential attachment does give us an insight into why we have scale-free networks that can ramp up a given dimension into the stratosphere, for example when a meme goes ‘viral’ in popularity.

We are within a network of other people, perhaps in a family or friends context, and perhaps in a business context, with all of our connections. Therefore we are a vertex, surrounded by edges connected to other vertices. As a node, then, how do we consider and evaluate our ‘fitness’ within a network? And if we follow my modification of the above model and consider that there is another complementary parameter of ‘value’, how do we evaluate our value? Do you proffer value? Does your value afford the rewarding of network fitness? Does your network fitness promote visibility and popularity to attract more connectivity? Is your network fitness greedy from a competitive point of view, or generous from a collaborative point of view?

It’s my opinion that the Barabási-Albert model or the later refined Bianconi / Barabási model is missing an ingredient, because as it stands, it recognises fitness as a greedy action of competition success. However, people don’t necessarily work that way, or at least, not for very long (especially if we add the complication of the breadcrumb-path of reputation as a persistence aspect, etc. but we shouldn’t complicate it here, let’s keep it simple. Oops, too late). People in business leverage a blend of competition and collaboration — too much of one or the other and it’s not a good business success. The models require an extra thing, and I suggest that this is an outward-pushing ‘value’ aspect, that complements the inward-grabbing ‘fitness’ aspect. Being rewarded for offering value is akin to collaboration and is rewarded by fitness affordance which is of course akin to competition according to the BA and BB models above.

One more thing. The Tournament in graph theory is a directed graph, which forms the directivity progressively along a duration. In other words, there is a predetermined topology of the network but the directivity is not laid down yet. It gets laid down connection by connection. The outcome of this is that it describes a dominance model, and relates to social choice theory. The reason that people make choices is interesting, but the reasons that people within an influencing and influenceable group make their choices is even more interesting. With great power comes great scriptwriting and marketing, or something like that, and the responsibility of being a big noise in a highly connected network is possibly more paramount than many people realise. I suppose the only advice I can give is to be a valuable person for the sake of your reputation, because the reputation forms a persistent record. Whether that means being nice, or whether that means you can get away with being a bastard, that’s up to you — it’s your value, your fitness, your transactional reputation imprint.