Antony Ball, who wrote a South African version of In Search of Excellence, points out that a book can be a great hub: ‘I met people I would never have met but for the book. All kinds of people wrote to me. It brought a lot of business.’
Our respondents typically juggle about half a dozen hubs, which often mix business, socialising and hobbies.
Alex Johnstone tells of a dinner party where one of the guests proposed doing an ‘audit’ of the social groups in which they all participated:
It was a classic consultant two-by-two matrix in which you compare the time and energy put into each hub with the enjoyment or other reward derived from the hub. Hubs with high effort and high return were working well. Hubs where there was low effort and low reward might be due for more effort–or the chop. Hubs with low effort and high reward might deserve more time. Finally the problem area–high effort, low reward.
At first, I thought this was a rather cold-blooded way to think about social interaction, but it made me talk to my partner about our circles of friends. We decided to stop making an effort for one group that never invited us anywhere, and to spend more time with the friends we enjoyed most. It made a big difference to our social life.
It’s easy to see life as a series of jobs or family and social obligations. But a more inspiring perspective is to think of it in terms of the groups that have been, are, or will be important to us, the people with whom we want to do something serious or enjoyable in our lives.
Most people in the affluent world now have an extraordinary degree of choice of hubs to join, a privilege that was denied to most previous generations. We can sample several hubs and appreciate why they do or don’t work for us. We can gain more contacts and discover which individuals and groups we enjoy. We can learn what type of contribution we enjoy making. We can understand what complementary skills we require from other people. We can become central to an existing hub and change its course: making it better, more useful to other people, stronger and richer. We can become a magnet for attractive, energetic, talented and unfulfilled co-conspirators, old or young. We can start our own hub, with partners who have different strengths and cover for weaknesses. We can gain money and time; and money is time, our own or that of other people we pay to work with us.
It’s inspiring to think of life like this, where we have the luxury of choosing collaborators, and on what we collaborate. How marvellous to be alive, improbably, at a time when all this is possible. We can achieve and enjoy far more in groups than we ever could on our own. This is the destiny stumbled across by humans–not just to unite in groups, but to create new groups with unique and hitherto unimagined characters and purposes. Society grows richer, more variegated and intriguing as we form new hubs to boldly go where no group has gone before.
CHAPTER NINE
THE NETWORK STRUCTURE OF IDEAS
Are weak links and hubs the key to realising great ideas?
People like to think that businesses are built of numbers–‘the bottom line’–or forces–‘market forces’–or even flesh and blood–‘our people’. But this is wrong. Businesses are made of ideas–ideas expressed as words.
Business guru James Champy58
Roman Empire, province of Judaea, first century AD
Once upon a time, there was a Jewish preacher and faith-healer who, for a couple of years, exerted enormous appeal. His message was a brilliant synthesis of the teachings of the best Jewish prophets–such as Isaiah and Hosea–who called for social justice and self-improvement. The preacher said that God was intervening in history, using the Jews in general and himself in particular to bring history to a wonderful climax, establishing a special Jewish kingdom on earth. He talked of God’s love, compassion and concern for social outcasts, the poor, the sinners, the impure, the untouchables. It was easy, he said, to love our friends and family, but the real challenge was to love people whom we would normally shun–such as foreigners, prostitutes, the diseased and criminals. The preacher had an idiosyncratic view of God–as a loving father who was more interested in sinners than the righteous and who reached out to all of his people. The preacher himself rescued an adulteress from being stoned to death, he restored the sick and deformed to full health, and he gave dignity and purpose to swindlers and the most hated group in Judaea, the men who collected harsh taxes on behalf of the Roman occupiers. God, he said, cared little for formal religion and meticulous observation of Jewish rites, being impressed only by human kindness, mercy, and care for the unfortunate and the oppressed. God could speak directly to the individual, however lowly, to women as well as men, to the disreputable as well as the respectable; and the individual, sensing God’s unconditional love, could respond, using his or her conscience to interpret and follow God’s will.
Although the preacher’s message was just about within the best (albeit most radical) Jewish prophetic tradition, the priests of the Jerusalem Temple felt he was straying into dangerous territory. They were jealous of the crowds who followed him and nervous that he was going to lead a rebellion against their Roman rulers–who would be merciless in crushing the Jews, and might even destroy the Temple in retribution. So the high priest and his Temple police shopped the preacher to the Roman governor, a notorious thug. The preacher was tortured and executed. In physical and mental agony, he wondered, just before he died, why God had deserted him. The preacher had promised a new kingdom of God; but God had not delivered it.
The crowds melted away, but a tiny band of the preacher’s family and die-hard supporters, led by his brother James, did not give up. The preacher had made a deep impression on them, and they could not imagine life without him. They insisted that he was not really dead. Jesus, they said, had been God’s latest and greatest messenger, fulfilling the words of earlier prophets, the ‘Messiah’, God’s chosen one. As a sign of approval, God had raised him from the dead and lifted him up to heaven. Soon Jesus would return in triumph on the clouds as the ‘Son of Man’ prophesied by Daniel, the Jews would unite, and God’s new kingdom on earth would be inaugurated. The Roman Empire, and the whole earth as currently constituted, would end abruptly.
Apart from their beliefs about Jesus, the ‘followers of the Way’, as they called themselves, were conventional religious Jews, to be found worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem, observing the ancient rites as meticulously as the Pharisees did, living austerely and engaging in good works. Some followers of the Way left Jerusalem and became part of the Jewish groups in Asia Minor, North Africa, Rome and elsewhere. The Greek-speaking Jews of the ‘Diaspora’ (dispersion beyond Judaea) settled in many ports, and a small minority of these–known as ‘Hellenists’–also followed the Way. They popped up ten or twenty years after the death of Jesus in the cities of Caesarea Maritima in Samaria, Alexandria and Rome, all largely non-Jewish settlements.
The largest group of Jesus’ followers outside Jerusalem congregated in the Syrian city of Antioch, where, around AD 46, they were first called ‘Christians’ (followers of the Messiah). Although they were exposed to Greek culture, and may have sought converts among the ‘god-fearers’–non-Jews who were attracted to Judaism by its austerity and/or monotheism–the Way did not attract many non-Jewish followers. As with any other Jewish group, a Gentile (Greek or Roman) man who wished to join first had to become a Jew, submitting to the fearsome operation of circumcision and observing all Jewish laws and rites, including a ban on most meat. Like all Jews, the followers of the Way arrogantly refused to pay respect to the Roman gods, or observe Roman civil and religious rituals. And this form of Judaism, if any non-Jew heard about it, was the most extreme and unacceptable. To the average Roman in the Forum, there was something particularly offensive in claiming that a renegade who had been crucified–a loser’s fate if ever there was one–had been raised from the dead by God, and would return to inaugurate God’s kingdom and free the Jews from Roman rule. All of this may have been treated as nonsense, but it was also an affront to everything the Romans held dear.