In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter gave this powerful process a name: “The Strength of Weak Ties.” Granovetter had spent time researching the ways people found new jobs. After surveying hundreds of job seekers, he found there were three main strategies: responding to job ads; direct request and cold calling; or take advantage of personal contacts.
When Granovetter analyzed the data, two things emerged. First of all, the jobs that people had heard about through personal contacts were the best of all. These jobs were more likely to have high salaries than jobs found through formal means or direct application, and they were more likely to be satisfying: more than 54 percent of people who had heard about their job through personal contacts They were “very satisfied.” with the new job, compared with 52.8 percent who had used direct application and only 30 percent who had used formal methods.
But the second finding was even more intriguing: When people got these jobs by word of mouth, most of the time they did so through a weak tie. Nearly 28 percent of people learned about their work from someone they saw once a year or less. Another 55.6 percent learned about their job from someone they saw “more than once a year but less than twice a week.” Only a minority learned about the job through a “strong connection,” someone they saw at least twice a week. To put it another way, a close friend is much less likely to hear about a great job offer. You are much more likely to find out about it from a distant colleague.
“It is remarkable,” Granovetter marveled, “that people receive crucial information from individuals whose existence they have forgotten.”
Why would this be? Surely your closest friends are the ones who look out for you and are eager to help you find a good job? Sure, but as Granovetter pointed out, your friends have an information deficit. They are too similar.
This is the principle of homophily: socially, we tend to be close friends with people who reflect us demographically, culturally, intellectually, politically, and professionally. This makes it easier to bond, but it also means that we draw from the same pool of information. All the jobs my close friends have heard about, I’ve heard about too.
>Our friends have an information deficit. They are too similar.
Weak ties are different. These people, as Granovetter pointed out, are further away, so they absorb information we don’t have and move among people we don’t know at all. That’s why they are the people most likely to negotiate juicy job offers. “Acquaintances, compared to close friends, are more likely to move in different circles than oneself,” Granovetter argued. The links are weak, but they are rich conduits of information.
The only people who trafficked* tons of contacts back in the 1970s from Granoveter were what Malcolm Gladwell called connectors, those rare, deeply social types who I knew a lot more people than average. Those people were powerful precisely because of their octopus-like connections with so many weak ties. They negotiated information that the rest of us were simply too lazy, busy, *or constitutionally unsuitable for leverage.
>Links are weak, but they are rich conduits of information.
Today’s environmental tools dissolve those boundaries. They make it much easier for us to monitor weak links and leverage them more. This phenomenon transforms ordinary people into superconnectors, in light and daily contact with many more people than before.
And while Google is useful for quickly answering a specific factual question, people networks leverage wisdom and judgment, not just comparison of fact patterns. They are better off in confusing terms, “any idea-of-how-to-deal-with-this?“Dilemmas that occupy everyday life.
