That is how, one muggy day in spring 2001, in a tiny, crowded space in Parsons Green, south-west London, which Betfair humorously called its ‘boardroom’, we eventually got acquainted. We also came to see that the firm’s success stemmed largely from the network of gamblers it assembled. As Betfair’s network became much stronger than that of any rival exchange–particularly once Flutter had joined forces–serious gamblers gravitated to it. The chances of getting their bet ‘matched’ by someone taking the opposite view was much better on a larger exchange than a smaller one. As more and more gamblers joined the Betfair site, it grew to become twenty or thirty times bigger than any other exchange. It became what we have come to term a superconnector.
So how did Superconnect the book arise? It came about because Greg suggested the idea to Richard. Richard had put him on an email list consisting of a diverse set of friends and acquaintances he used to test out his new book ideas, and Greg spontaneously replied, ‘These are all OK, but there’s something interesting to be written around six degrees of separation and network effects.’ Richard loved the suggestion and asked Greg to collaborate on the book.
Again, it took a combination of experience to tackle it with confidence. Greg was sure of the subject matter, and Richard was the author of a string of successful books about business, ideas and careers. But even then, this book would not have reached its current form but for a book agent in Oxford called Sally Holloway, who forced Richard and Greg to write a decent proposal that led to an auction in which three leading New York publishers participated. Richard had only come across Sally because a former colleague had suggested they meet.
So the way the authors met and the way the book originated each comprised a series of human contacts, long chains of personal links that became fully apparent only in retrospect. If any one of the links had not existed, we would not have worked at Betfair, we would not have met, we would not have written this book. In the pages that follow, we will present dozens of stories–and a lot of scientific evidence–that indicate that our experience, while unique, is also routine. In other words, the improbable is the rule! If you look backwards at any key event in your life, the chances are that it shouldn’t have happened how it did.
This was an unusual book to write. Sometimes it felt that as we wrote it we were exploring the truly unusual–cutting-edge insights into the way the human world works. As one of those involved puts it, ‘Network science is the science of the twenty-first century.’ At other times it was as if we were merely distilling the wisdom of grandmothers, dispensed for free at every kitchen table. The territory is so familiar to everyone–the relationships we have and the groups we belong to–that anyone can have an opinion on it. And grandmothers have lived a long time and generally learned a thing or two. But grandmothers are not usually adept at science, and there is a true subtlety about the material we uncovered–those things we live with every day and think we know, yet may know the least–that no grandmother of our acquaintance has been able to put into words.
For instance, it wasn’t immediately evident how one of the core findings of the book–that the friendly acquaintances and distant contacts we often forget about lead to knowledge, opportunity and innovation that make life much more exciting and fulfilling–came into play. Nor that our strong relationships with people and groups–those we depend on the most–can actually hold us back. But we found that putting these things together unlocked a powerful new perspective on social and career mobility.
Coming as even more of a surprise to us was the realisation that the network of relationships between people and groups that makes up society is shaped mostly by superconnectors–a rare group of people and businesses who are disproportionately connected. These people and businesses are the bridges to distant and different parts of society that make our world smaller, and its vast richness accessible. And in the business world they are the increasingly dominant crossroads that hold far-reaching implications for market structure, strategy and industrial policy.
An array of scientists–including sociologists, psychologists, physicists, mathematicians and computer experts–have recently made some dramatic advances in understanding how networks behave. As authors we see our job as explaining their discoveries, and placing them in a human, social and practical context that will help you to understand how to shape your own networks, and decide which ones to play in and which to avoid.
However, the more we thought about the science of networks, the more we found it describes and informs a variety of important but disparate aspects of our world–innovation, poverty, the interrelationship of ideas and the nature of society itself. And as our world becomes increasingly connected through technology, these network effects grow ever more pronounced.
So, this book covers a lot of scientific ground, yet it also relates directly to people’s personal lives. Have you ever asked yourself how anything important in your life happens? If you look back on any turning-point, you’ll uncover a chain of human contacts–as we did–who played a critical role in what happened to you. This book is about how those contacts operate, and how to increase the chances of happy outcomes in our personal life, career or business.
But, of course, all of our lives have to consist of key events. The world may not be predictable, but its unpredictability is, and this is shaped by networks. Once you grasp this point, and the fact that the world is unpredictable in a beautiful and ordered way, you can begin to shift the odds against opportunity and even happiness in your favour.
Networks behave in predictable and characteristic ways that we humans are not programmed to understand or appreciate. And they typically create few winners. So if we want to lead lives full of opportunity, we had better learn how to play by their rules.
CHAPTER ONE
AUTHORS OF OUR OWN SUCCESS?
Charlie Chaplin, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and the unsettling discovery that outside forces may determine success
Maximise the serendipity around you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hollywood, 1936
If you wanted to protest against the dehumanising effects of the Industrial Revolution by projecting a single striking picture of its oppression, how would you do it? In the movie Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin came up with a timeless image–he placed himself within a great revolving cog, as if inside a giant clock, part of a great mechanised factory, and showed himself buffeted by the wheel’s endless revolutions.
Although it was a new and powerful portrayal, Chaplin stood–or rather, lay–in a great tradition of the ‘romantic’ railing against industry and its enslaving machines, stretching back to William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. Writers such as Blake contrasted the smelly, sordid slums of Manchester with the contented cows and peasants painted a few years earlier by Thomas Gainsborough against a bucolic background of haystacks, green fields and gently rippling rivers.
But the romantics were better at poetry and painting than they were at history. The truth was that very few British agricultural workers in the eighteenth century enjoyed much freedom or what we would today call ‘job satisfaction’ theirs was a hard life in which they did what they were told, rarely had enough to eat, and faced famine and starvation at regular intervals. That was why so many people fled their rural slums to find work in the cities. Nobody forced them to go. They went in droves because, however awful life was in the mill towns, it was a great deal better than in the countryside. Karl Marx knew this–he said that industrialisation rescued workers from ‘the idiocy of rural life’.