by Flemming Funch
David Teten writes on Online Business Blog. You will usually benefit if the members of your network do not know one another. Ronald Burt, in his innovative and influential book, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition, provides fascinating support for the argument that both people and companies benefit by sitting in a “structural hole” of a network. A structural hole exists when there is only a weak connection between two clusters of densely connected people.
For example, let us say you are the head of German country sales for Hasbro, Inc., a major manufacturer of games and toys. Your value to Hasbro is as a pipeline to the German market. It is in your interest to build relationships with many people in both Hasbro headquarters and in the German market. You fill a structural hole between those two groups. In order to preserve that structural hole, we recommend you should probably not introduce the two pools of people (the American Hasbro toy-sellers and the German toy-buyers). I suppose that is traditional wisdom of job-security, applied to social networks. But I think that, as a general philosophy, that sucks big time. You try to deliberately keep the people from talking to each other that would most benefit from talking to each other, by making yourself the networking tollbooth.
Oh, I think most people do it in one way or another. Most people have their job because somebody somehow believes that they're needed for it. And if we're talking about knowledge work, or about the work of connecting some people over here with some people over there - then your job security might easily seem a little fragile. So, one easily gets into keeping some key pieces of information secret, so that nobody will be inspired to cut you out of the loop. Doesn't make it right, though.
In my ideal world, it would be the people who actually make the most difference who'd have the best job security. Not the people who pretend they're invaluable, simply because they hide part of the picture from everybody else. But, alas, society doesn't really work that way. You get paid by making somebody feel they have to pay you, not particularly by doing great work.
Although, the people who actually have figured out the system are doing the opposite. I.e. getting themselves out of the loop, rather than trying to seem like an invaluable link. I'm talking about the people who make businesses, as opposed to trying to hold a job and appear like a good employee. The trick is just how to engineer that most of us possibly might end up being so skilled or lucky.
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