Everywhere there are overlapping networks–producer networks, supplier networks, retail networks, customer networks, employee networks, consultant networks, technology cooperation networks, venture capital and banking networks, networks of friends and acquaintances cutting across firms, ex-colleague networks, online networks and computer information networks.
The expansion of hubs and weak links has opened up a new dimension of work, a different way of working. The business world used to divide neatly into a few entrepreneurs and a mass of passive employees. Now it is not so clear cut. There are many more entrepreneurs; but the really important change is that ordinary employees can behave like entrepreneurs, either in preparation for becoming one, or as an alternative.
By expanding our personal network and using weak links, our jobs can become more interesting and self-directed, and we can become more valuable. We may still work in somebody else’s firm, but we strive to control our own destiny, based on the unique networks each of us creates. Instead of work being starkly divided into owners and wage-slaves, we increasingly see a spectrum, a continuum ranging from total dependence on an organisation to ownership of it, with most people positioned between the extremes, yet gradually moving towards greater independence. Within each firm there are embryo entrepreneurs, poised to break out. Alternatively, we may choose to gain many of the benefits of running our own business–through making our value clear to our employers–without the risk or bother of setting up a new firm.
The more people who think of themselves as autonomous hubs with a useful network in tow–a unique and personal set of valuable weak links–the more society and the economy will change. For sure, power and wealth still reside in many long-established hubs, notably in government bureaucracies and the giant corporations listed on the stock exchange. Slowly but surely, however, innovation, wealth creation and therefore influence and independence are moving towards newer firms, entrepreneurs and the semi-autonomous individuals within all firms, away from the hubs themselves and towards the links within the hubs and outside them. These links may lead to new hubs, which for a time might become powerful, but they are usually the vehicles of individuals and groups of individuals. And hubs, old or new, will always be challenged by innovators whose main weapons, at least initially, are usually their weak links to other individuals and their ideas.
The links are personal alliances–easily formed, constantly shifting, nearly always non-contractual–based on casual friendship, empathy and millions of unrecorded favours granted and reciprocated. The network economy allows some lucky or creative individuals to capture unprecedented fortunes. Yet the source of wealth is not organizational–it is personal, a huge extended chain of information and insight where no money changes hands, a collage of favours freely given with only the vaguest sense that they will be paid back somewhere in the chain at some undetermined future time. In this new form of capitalism, competition has not been abolished or abated a whit, but the human instinct for cooperation has become a parallel force driving the economy and society forward, increasing wealth and autonomy at the same time.
Whether at work, as citizens or in our leisure pursuits, we used to be connected primarily by organisations–firms, trade unions, holiday camps, clubs and societies, travel firms. Increasingly, we are now also connected by individual initiatives, online links and spontaneous offline meetings, personal networking and chance meetings with acquaintances, friends of friends, and strangers. Whenever individuals take the initiative and organise their own lives, independent of existing institutions or by forming their own informal groupings–such as Burning Man–society becomes more fluid, unpredictable, open ended, uncontrolled, organic and personal. Hierarchy ebbs; personality flows. Networks are individualised, and individuals networked.
So, we are not only shifting from hierarchies to networks, but also seeing a shift from the more hierarchical and inflexible networks towards the least structured and most personal kind of network–weak links. People who maintain a wide array of diverse weak links make use of network power in its purest and most spontaneous form–social, personal and based on intelligence in the broadest possible sense: superior information and insight that are transformed into something useful through collaboration.
We started this book with two contrasting views of the world: Charlie Chaplin as victim; and James Dean as iconoclast and forerunner of the ‘me-generation’. We have argued that there is a third way between the extremes of hierarchy and individualism, and that networks provide a better model in two senses–a more accurate map of the modern world and a better way of organising society.
The idea of the lone individual against the world has a mythical, romantic attraction for many of us; but it provides no map of social reality. If we do not realise the importance of choosing our hubs carefully, of moving on from them when we do not want or plan to do so, and of noticing the beautiful and intricate intertwining web of weak links around us–any apparently inconsequential one of which might move our life up to a new level–then we will be unlikely to fulfil our individual potential. Actually, networks thrive on individuality, because new networks are always created and expanded by innovators. They thrive on the differences between people, on the insights that come from pulling together good ideas from diverse worlds. Networks facilitate communication; communication facilitates networks. For communication to have content, there has to be an exchange of information, some element of surprise, some news or insight.
History reveals a pattern whereby humans have become increasingly specialised, yet increasingly connected. The world has never been bigger: more people; more land occupied; more countries; more cities and gathering places, even unto cyberspace; more wealth; more ideas and inventions; more hubs of all kinds, organisations devoted to business, government, education, culture, mutual help, strange specialties. But the world has also never been smaller: we can travel, use the phone, meet online and use weak links that will take us from one acquaintance to another in a marvellous, unending chain of human existence stretching right around the planet.
The fact that the big world is also a small world is due entirely to the growth of networks and the decline of hierarchies, to the victory of communication over regimentation, and to the triumph of individualism. A small minority of people have superconnected, and the rest of us have responded, albeit imperfectly, to the opportunities that new networks have bestowed.
Of course, social, religious and ideological barriers remain. Huge numbers are still trapped in oppressive regimes; or in poverty and isolation, exclusively reliant on friends, family and employers, without the vital weak links into a broader community. But most of us in developed countries are lucky enough to be able to roam free, not as reckless individuals, but as collaborators who can connect intelligently to a large number of people–our own unique set of contacts and information–many of whom are far removed from the constraints that our social background, location and training used to place on us.