Latest / The Action Catalyst / REMASTERED: Doing Business With Friends of Friends, with David Burkus (Management, Networking, Science, Business)

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REMASTERED: Doing Business With Friends of Friends, with David Burkus (Management, Networking, Science, Business) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:30
  Host: David Burkus is here. His book's called Friend of a
• 0:33
  Friend. So David, welcome back to the show.
• 0:35
  David Burkus: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
• 0:37
  Host: Well, let's do this. So tell me so friend of a friend.
• 0:40
  It's based on the science of human behavior and not on rote
• 0:44
  networking advice. So what does that mean exactly?
• 0:47
  David Burkus: This is not a new topic, right? We know this is
• 0:49
  important. We know we've heard the phrases, your network is
• 0:51
  your net worth, right? And all of those sort of phrases. And
• 0:54
  yet, most of what we're consuming is what I would call
• 0:58
  networking advice, right? And it's, someone's advice on here's
• 1:01
  how to give the perfect elevator pitch, or how to introduce two
• 1:03
  people. And it's good stuff. I mean, some of it, you know, How
• 1:06
  to Win Friends and Influence People, is a perennial. It's
• 1:08
  classic, right? So it's good stuff, but it's usually it's one
• 1:12
  person's advice, right? And that one person can sometimes be
• 1:15
  different than you, that some one person can have different
• 1:17
  experiences than you, etc. And a lot of people take that advice
• 1:20
  and then they go to the event, or they go to that thing where
• 1:23
  they're trying to meet new people. They try and put that
• 1:24
  advice into practice, and then they feel weird and sleazy and
• 1:28
  inauthentic and well, like No wonder you feel inauthentic.
• 1:30
  You're trying to be someone else, you know, by doing their
• 1:33
  thing. So I'm trying to take a little bit different track,
• 1:35
  which is for the last 50 or 60 years, scientists from a variety
• 1:39
  of fields, mathematics, but also behavioral science, behavioral
• 1:42
  science, behavior, economics, sociology, etc, have been
• 1:44
  studying how networks actually work, how, if A is connected to
• 1:47
  B and B is connected to C, how are c and A's relationship, and
• 1:51
  what, what's going on in sort of the broader network. And so the
• 1:54
  the big ideas, I think most people need to learn less of
• 1:57
  someone else's advice and need to learn more about the network
• 1:59
  that they're already a part of, and get a better map on that and
• 2:03
  then respond accordingly. I mean, and network is not
• 2:05
  something you have, and networking is not necessarily
• 2:08
  something you do, like you already exist inside of a
• 2:11
  network. There's one network, 7.4 billion people strong and
• 2:14
  counting. But then whatever industry you're trying to sell
• 2:17
  to or be a part of, whatever community that you're engaged in
• 2:20
  that's already a network. And the better strategy is to figure
• 2:23
  out, Where am I in this, who am I already connected to? Who do I
• 2:26
  need to be connected to? How can I chart a path from from me to
• 2:29
  them, etc? And when you when you start to do that, it looks a
• 2:32
  whole lot less like running around trying to just add people
• 2:35
  to your contacts on LinkedIn or email addresses under your
• 2:38
  phone, and looks a whole lot more like mapping the community
• 2:41
  that you're a part of, so you can start providing value to
• 2:44
  that community and letting that value come back to you. And you
• 2:46
  know, a lot of us, when we think about growing our network, we
• 2:48
  immediately go to the sort of strangers approach, right? I'm
• 2:51
  gonna go try and meet new people, whether that's at an
• 2:53
  event or whether that is cold calling, whatever is. I'm gonna
• 2:57
  try to meet new people, as opposed to knowing that inside
• 3:00
  of the network that we're already a part of, there are
• 3:02
  people that we know but we haven't talked to in a while. We
• 3:04
  call these in network science the weak or dormant ties.
• 3:07
  There's people that are warm referrals. They're one degree of
• 3:10
  separation out from us, and we can be introduced to them. In
• 3:12
  fact, that probably the funniest study in the entire book is
• 3:16
  looking at Is there truth behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and
• 3:20
  so and what happens is people train and connect, try and
• 3:23
  connect one actor to another actor through Kevin Bacon in six
• 3:26
  steps or less. And it's possible, it's also possible to
• 3:29
  do it without Kevin Bacon. In fact, there's actually nothing
• 3:31
  special about Kevin Bacon. He's a fluke of history in terms of
• 3:34
  being connected. He's the 669th most connected person in
• 3:39
  Hollywood. But it's good news for all of us. Right? What it
• 3:41
  suggests is that if you think about you're not you may not be
• 3:44
  in Hollywood, but if you think about your industry or your
• 3:46
  geography as a network, you don't have to have this
• 3:49
  incredible, super connectors network. You're already probably
• 3:52
  one or two degrees of separation out from everyone that you need
• 3:56
  to meet and get to know. It's just a matter of knowing what is
• 3:59
  my path to them, who could introduce me to them, etc.
• 4:02
  That's that's a much better strategy than thinking about
• 4:05
  like, Okay, I need to just add as many new contacts to my to my
• 4:09
  app as possible. It's much more about going, Okay, I need, I
• 4:12
  know, I need these types of people. How can I get better
• 4:14
  connected to them?
• 4:15
  Host: Yeah, is there anything specific that we should be doing
• 4:19
  with that information, or is it just more of like it's about the
• 4:22
  mindset shift of going just nurture, spend time nurturing
• 4:26
  what you have, and work that not building a new network?
• 4:30
  David Burkus: So I would say that's the first part. The
• 4:32
  second is, as you're nurturing the connections you already
• 4:35
  have, I coach a lot of people to get in the practice of asking
• 4:38
  the question, Who do you know in blank, with blank being whatever
• 4:42
  industry sector segment that you want to get to know more of now
• 4:44
  that's different than what most people will do if they find out.
• 4:47
  Usually, they'll wait till they find out that they have a
• 4:49
  connection to that one person, that amazing person that's going
• 4:52
  to fill their quota for the quarter, or going to introduce
• 4:56
  them to the Hollywood executive that's going to get them in a
• 4:58
  feature film. Right? We're. When we think about that, maybe we
• 5:01
  even like we don't even know we LinkedIn stock, and then it
• 5:03
  tells us we have this connection. Then we go to that
• 5:05
  one person and we beg for an introduction. A better approach
• 5:08
  is to sort of systematically be asking contacts we already have,
• 5:11
  Hey, who do you know? In blank, whatever that segment is, and
• 5:15
  let them come up with not just one person, but a list of names.
• 5:17
  Usually, that list of names is going to be people they would be
• 5:20
  comfortable introducing you to, and when you're doing that to
• 5:22
  five or six different people and the same two or three names come
• 5:25
  up, that's a strong signal, in terms of the network, that
• 5:28
  that's the right person for you, and that that person is also
• 5:32
  probably different than the one that you thought you needed to
• 5:34
  get connected to. I mean, if there's 7.4 billion people in
• 5:37
  the world, the likelihood that the person you think is going to
• 5:39
  transform your business is also the person that really is going
• 5:42
  to transform your business. It's pretty small, so it's better to
• 5:45
  have a very open edge mentality of I'm trying to explore the
• 5:48
  fringes of the network in its totality, and then we can figure
• 5:51
  out who are the right people to get connected to.
• 5:53
  Host: Yeah. You talk about networking events. There is a
• 5:57
  term that you introduce called multiplexity.
• 6:01
  David Burkus: Yeah, yeah. And the way to think about network
• 6:01
  Host: Uh huh. There's a concept again here in the book that you
• 6:03
  meetings is sort of like adding fuel to the fire of doing this
• 6:06
  warm lead thing anyway, right? If you go, you're going to
• 6:08
  accelerate that. But what a lot of people do is they run around
• 6:11
  and they ask, in my opinion, the wrong question they ask. So what
• 6:14
  do you do? Which it sounds like? It's a great question, because
• 6:17
  it sounds like it cuts out of the small talk and gets to the
• 6:20
  heart of it. But there's a 12. I call it a $12 word,
• 6:22
  multiplexity. And what it is in network science is it's
• 6:25
  essentially a realization that even though a might know B,
• 6:28
  there are multiple different ways in which people can know
• 6:30
  each other. So when we have just one thing in common or one
• 6:33
  reason to connect, we call that a uniplex tie, right? So when
• 6:36
  it's just work related, that's a uniplex tie, if we work
• 6:38
  together, but our kids go to the same elementary school, and we
• 6:41
  also see each other at the gym. That's a multiplex tie. There's
• 6:44
  multiple different contexts in which we see each other, and the
• 6:47
  research strongly suggests that you will build a better and
• 6:50
  deeper relationship with someone faster if you're building
• 6:53
  multiplex ties. So we go back to this question. So what do you
• 6:56
  do? The problem with that is, you're at a networking event,
• 6:58
  especially you're in a situation where the context is sending a
• 7:01
  strong signal that we're supposed to talk about work. And
• 7:04
  then when you ask, so what do you do? You send a strong signal
• 7:07
  that that's what I'm interested in talking to. The context is
• 7:10
  going to shift your conversation to work eventually. Anyway, so I
• 7:13
  advise people lead with a little bit different question, right?
• 7:16
  Something that's open ended, something that they can explore.
• 7:18
  So this could be anything that feels natural but explores some
• 7:21
  other dimensions. So what excites you right now? Where did
• 7:24
  you grow up? I actually like to ask who's your favorite
• 7:27
  superhero, just because you can learn a lot about somebody when
• 7:29
  talking about superhero, but anything that explores them from
• 7:32
  another aspect. I mean, humans are multifaceted creatures,
• 7:35
  right? And the way that you build a deeper relationship,
• 7:38
  stronger with them is is to be multi fascinated by the
• 7:40
  different elements of them. You get to know them better on
• 7:43
  multiple different levels. And you do that, I think, by
• 7:45
  starting with a little bit different question. It might
• 7:48
  sound like small talk, it might sound trivial, but you're
• 7:51
  exploring other possible avenues and things you might have in
• 7:53
  common. And when you come back to work, you will have a deeper
• 7:56
  relationship, a stronger level of trust, etc, than if you just
• 7:59
  focused in on work related things. The key is you also have
• 8:02
  to be legitimately interested in the other person, right? Which
• 8:05
  is part of being a decent human being, but, but if you are, then
• 8:08
  there's no reason to stay within those guide rails that we think
• 8:11
  we're supposed to do of the so what do you do? Let's exchange
• 8:14
  business cards. Let's only think about each other in a work
• 8:16
  context. The other thing is that as you go throughout your whole
• 8:19
  the longitude of your whole career, you might actually find
• 8:22
  that your personal friends, the people that are connected to you
• 8:25
  for sort of non work reasons, end up becoming work
• 8:27
  relationships. And in friend of a friend, we tell the story of
• 8:30
  Whitney Johnson, who's a brilliant thinker, a good friend
• 8:33
  of mine. Whitney's biggest sort of thing, before she went as a
• 8:36
  writer, speaker, thinker, was she worked for an investment
• 8:39
  firm called Rose Park advisors started by Clayton Christensen,
• 8:41
  the brilliant mind behind disruptive innovation. How did
• 8:44
  she get that job? Well, she was working in Wall Street, but she
• 8:47
  got that job because she was serving on a committee at church
• 8:50
  with Clay Christensen. He got to see how she worked in that
• 8:53
  capacity. And that was the capacity that made him say,
• 8:55
  like, you know what, I want you to lead my firm when I started
• 8:58
  right, which is not you wouldn't think that at all, like no one's
• 9:01
  job. Advice is, go start thinking about the people that
• 9:04
  you know from church. But the truth is, people are multi
• 9:06
  dimensional, and you have no idea how those connections are
• 9:09
  going to pay off in the future. So be generally interested in
• 9:12
  all of the facets of someone, and it will not only pay off
• 9:14
  because you get to know them better and are a better human
• 9:17
  being, it'll probably pay off in the long run, even in your
• 9:20
  career as well. If a knows B and B knows C, C is more likely to
• 9:23
  know a. In reality, too much. Transitivity is actually a bad
• 9:26
  thing, like when you have too many of the same, close
• 9:28
  connections, then you all kind of think alike, act alike.
• 9:31
  Everybody knows each other, so that even the introductions and
• 9:34
  referrals you're going to get are very similar to you. So
• 9:36
  transitivity can actually be a bad thing. We need some of it
• 9:39
  because we have to have close connections, but we also have to
• 9:42
  monitor what's my how much time am I spending with the same few
• 9:45
  people versus with the people that are further out in my
• 9:48
  network that I'm sort of rewarming those ties?
• 9:53
  talk about; structural holes.
• 9:55
  David Burkus: Yeah. So this is probably one of my favorite
• 9:57
  insights from the whole world of network. Science. Structural
• 10:00
  holes refers to networks between. We just talked about
• 10:03
  transitivity. That leads to sort of clustering. People tend to
• 10:05
  cluster off, right? So they cluster off by industry. They
• 10:08
  cluster off by ideology, like political ideology. They cluster
• 10:12
  for a bunch of different reasons. And what that creates
• 10:14
  over time is it's almost like planets and space, right?
• 10:17
  There's Earth and there's Mars, and in between there's nothing.
• 10:19
  Well, sometimes there's the moon, but you know what I mean?
• 10:21
  Like, it creates a gap, an empty space in the network. And it
• 10:25
  turns out that the people who bridge that gap, who connect two
• 10:28
  communities to each other, who allow who become sort of an
• 10:31
  information flow between them, those are the people that end up
• 10:34
  creating the most value for both of those communities, and the
• 10:37
  people who generate sort of the most value for themselves,
• 10:39
  because they're seen as that connector. And this is, you
• 10:42
  know, if you think about this in a rudimentary level, we know
• 10:44
  this in the sense of, like, if you work in sales, for example,
• 10:47
  you have the group of sales people. That's a cluster, you
• 10:50
  sort of community of practice. Then you have the target market
• 10:53
  that you're you're working in. That's another but do we ever
• 10:55
  think about, okay, what are the other clusters that are kind of
• 10:57
  connected to that target market, right? And some, some industries
• 11:00
  do this really instinctively. Real estate agents, for example,
• 11:03
  are great at knowing that they also need to be connected to the
• 11:06
  title company and the mortgage office of people. But the same
• 11:09
  thing works for sort of almost all of it. I cut my teeth my
• 11:12
  first job out of school, I was a pharmaceutical sales rep, right?
• 11:15
  And one of the advantages that I had was that there's drug reps
• 11:18
  and then there's doctors, but there's also nurses, there's
• 11:21
  medical device reps, there's a couple different clusters that
• 11:23
  if I can start to bridge a lot of those structural holes, I can
• 11:26
  create a lot more value for everybody. And that spills over
• 11:29
  into my own career as well. You know, it's, it's social capital,
• 11:32
  right? This is a term that describes the value when a
• 11:35
  community is well, interconnected versus
• 11:37
  geographically dispersed, but also it's the value that the
• 11:39
  person doing that spills over into that person doing the
• 11:42
  connecting, right? And, you know, I think the big takeaway,
• 11:44
  like TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE, is that, how can you be that
• 11:46
  person, right? What is the community that doesn't exist,
• 11:48
  that needs to exist that would help your career, help your
• 11:51
  clients, help people that are doing something similar to you?
• 11:53
  You've got to go build that on the small scale as well. Because
• 11:56
  one of the things that we know from the research on structural
• 11:58
  holes and on social capital is that there is not a spillover
• 12:01
  effect, right? If you're the broker, there's a huge value
• 12:04
  that's created for both communities and for you. If
• 12:06
  you're one degree of separation from that broker, none of that
• 12:09
  value spills over, right? It doesn't affect your career. Just
• 12:12
  because you know the person connecting, you have to be the
• 12:14
  person connecting. Where can I build that little bit of a
• 12:16
  community? Where can I connect to communities? Where can I be a
• 12:19
  broker, even in the small scale? Because it's not enough to just
• 12:21
  rely on other people to always be giving you those
• 12:24
  introductions, but you have to be that person that's actually
• 12:26
  connecting. And everybody can. This is not an introvert versus
• 12:29
  extrovert thing. This is not a How long have I been in my
• 12:32
  career thing? Everybody can begin to pay attention to the
• 12:35
  network that exists and start to connect groups and communities
• 12:38
  and even just individual people closer together that creates
• 12:41
  value for that network, and it will spill over to you in turn.
• 12:44
  What I love about the term social capital too is it works
• 12:46
  just like any other capital. It compounds over time, so you've
• 12:49
  got to make the little investments in it. You can't
• 12:51
  just start withdrawing from it right away, like I can't buy a
• 12:55
  mutual fund and then go I'd like to withdraw $100,000 from it.
• 12:58
  Doesn't work that way. I have to actually have invested that
• 13:00
  amount of money first before I can do it. And networks, you
• 13:03
  know, they work the exact same way. And really, I mean, if I'm,
• 13:06
  if I'm going to be a little bit braggadocious, this is the big
• 13:09
  theory of the book too, which is, let's try and connect these
• 13:11
  two communities, the people that study networks and the people
• 13:14
  who need to know how to network better. It's not just advice.
• 13:16
  It's, hey, I'm just trying to be that connector to, well, here's
• 13:18
  the evidence based community that backs up all of the things
• 13:21
  that you're
• 13:21
  Host: Yeah. How do you know, like you said, Kevin Bacon is
• 13:24
  the 669 connected person in Hollywood. What's the process
• 13:28
  that y'all are doing to come up with something like that?
• 13:32
  David Burkus: Okay, so, so in that, in that specific
• 13:33
  situation, the way that the researchers did it was they
• 13:36
  basically took the data from Internet Movie Database and
• 13:38
  basically were saying, If you acted together in a movie,
• 13:41
  that's a connection, right? And so they can explore it's a very
• 13:44
  sort of big data thing, right? Actually, Facebook, by the way,
• 13:47
  does the exact same thing. I know we're in a bit of a data
• 13:49
  privacy and Facebook, but they actually, almost every year
• 13:52
  release a study that shows, based on the number of
• 13:54
  connections you have, like, how many bridges does it take to
• 13:57
  connect everyone in the Facebook community? And while it might be
• 14:00
  six degrees of separation for the 7.4 billion people who who
• 14:03
  are out there, for the 2 billion that have a Facebook account,
• 14:05
  it's actually only four introductions. So it sort of
• 14:08
  shrinks it. So you look at it when we're saying Kevin Bacon is
• 14:11
  669 it's because of the sheer sort of number of connections
• 14:13
  that he has. He ranks 669 there's, there was a, I think
• 14:16
  the most connected one, if I remember right, was just sort of
• 14:19
  an actor that had been in a bunch of different genres, but
• 14:21
  not as a feature actor. So just sort of rotating around, but
• 14:24
  you're building all of those relationships. The thing that's
• 14:27
  most fascinating to me is that you don't necessarily have to be
• 14:30
  that number one person. Even someone with as terrible a
• 14:32
  network as Kevin Bacon can create all the value in the
• 14:35
  world from connecting multiple different people and have that
• 14:37
  affect his career too. I mean, the guy's actually been in a
• 14:40
  visa ad about Six Degrees of Kevin Macon, right? All because
• 14:43
  of this thing that just happened, even though he wasn't
• 14:45
  the most connected. So everyone has this potential. You don't
• 14:48
  have to be that super extroverted guy who knows how to
• 14:51
  work the room type person. We all have that potential. We just
• 14:53
  need to pay a little bit more attention to the network that's
• 14:56
  around us and then respond accordingly. Actually, we dive
• 14:59
  into some of the research on really most of these online
• 15:01
  tools, whether it be LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or what have
• 15:04
  you, most of them are only really effective to the extent
• 15:07
  that they're a supplement for your existing offline network,
• 15:10
  not a replacement for right? So it's great to do it. It's great
• 15:12
  to jump into LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups and interact.
• 15:15
  You also have to sort of be finding ways to make that
• 15:18
  connection a bit more personal before it gets really valuable
• 15:20
  there. We all know those people that spend a little bit too much
• 15:23
  time on it and not enough time, like doing whatever the hard
• 15:26
  work of getting in front of people is, we tell ourselves
• 15:29
  that, oh, I'm building my network. I'm just saying, like,
• 15:31
  No, you're not. You're just posting articles on LinkedIn and
• 15:34
  calling that network and like, That's not. That's a great
• 15:37
  supplement to help you with connections, but it is not a
• 15:39
  replacement for the old school ways, and it's interesting in
• 15:42
  the age of technology and all this data, that that's what we find.
• 15:45
  Host: If somebody's out there listening right now, is in the
• 15:48
  spirit of the action catalyst podcast, what is the first thing
• 15:52
  that you would have them take action on, in terms of
• 15:55
  implementing everything that they are are learning here and
• 15:58
  what we're talking about?
• 15:59
  David Burkus: The first thing I would probably want them to do
• 16:01
  is in line with a little bit of what we talked about, of what we
• 16:04
  talked about with the research on weak ties, which is, I want
• 16:07
  you to think of five people that you haven't talked to in six
• 16:09
  months to a year, and I want you to do the work of reaching back
• 16:12
  out to them, engaging them in a conversation. You have my
• 16:14
  permission to wait till you find a relevant reason to do it, but
• 16:17
  you don't have my permission to ignore making the list. Get that
• 16:20
  list made, put it in front of you, and when that you start to
• 16:22
  think about them, or you read an article that they'd be
• 16:25
  interested in, or you see them post something online about what
• 16:27
  they're up to, that's your reason. That's your ramp to go
• 16:30
  back and reconnect with them and focus in on that first, because
• 16:33
  it's more comfortable, but it's hugely beneficial to not just
• 16:35
  you the overall network.
• 16:36
  Host: All right, my friends, David Burkus is who you're
• 16:38
  listening to. DavidBurkus.com and we wish you all the best.
• 16:41
  David Burkus: Oh, thank you so much, and thank you so much for
• 16:43
  having me and for sharing me with your community. I really
• 16:45
  appreciate it.