Doing Business With Friends of Friends, with David Burkus – Episode 240 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, professor, and organizational psychologist David Burkus leads a deep dive into the power of networking, exploring weak and dormant ties, structural holes in networks, social capital, navigating “multiplexity”, and the TRUTH behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

About David:

David Burkus is a Leadership & Teamwork Expert, Internationally Renowned Keynote Speaker, and Bestselling Author.

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David’s forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach leadership, teamwork, and collaboration.

A skilled researcher and inspiring communicator, Dr. David Burkus is the best-selling author of five books about business and leadership. His books have won multiple awards and have been translated into dozens of languages. Since 2017, David has been ranked multiple times as one of the world’s top business thought leaders. His insights on leadership and teamwork have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and CBS This Morning.

A former business school professor, David now works with leaders from organizations across all industries, including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe, and NASA. David’s keynotes aren’t just entertaining and enlightening, they’re evidence based and immensely practical—offering leaders at all levels a set of actionable takeaways they can implement immediately.

David Burkus translates intricate research into actionable strategies. His thought-provoking keynotes not only inspire but equip businesses to reimagine their potential and redefine their workplace.

Learn more at DavidBurkus.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
David Burkus is here. His book’s called Friend of a Friend. So David, welcome back to the show.

David Burkus
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Host
Well, let’s do this. So tell me so friend of a friend. It’s based on the science of human behavior and not on rote networking advice. So what does that mean exactly?

David Burkus
This is not a new topic, right? We know this is important. We know we’ve heard the phrases, your network is your net worth, right? And all of those sort of phrases. And yet, most of what we’re consuming is what I would call networking advice, right? And it’s, someone’s advice on here’s how to give the perfect elevator pitch, or how to introduce two people. And it’s good stuff. I mean, some of it, you know, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is a perennial. It’s classic, right? So it’s good stuff, but it’s usually it’s one person’s advice, right? And that one person can sometimes be different than you, that some one person can have different experiences than you, etc. And a lot of people take that advice and then they go to the event, or they go to that thing where they’re trying to meet new people. They try and put that advice into practice, and then they feel weird and sleazy and inauthentic and well, like No wonder you feel inauthentic. You’re trying to be someone else, you know, by doing their thing. So I’m trying to take a little bit different track, which is for the last 50 or 60 years, scientists from a variety of fields, mathematics, but also behavioral science, behavioral science, behavior, economics, sociology, etc, have been studying how networks actually work, how, if A is connected to B and B is connected to C, how are c and A’s relationship, and what, what’s going on in sort of the broader network. And so the the big ideas, I think most people need to learn less of someone else’s advice and need to learn more about the network that they’re already a part of, and get a better map on that and then respond accordingly. I mean, and network is not something you have, and networking is not necessarily something you do, like you already exist inside of a network. There’s one network, 7.4 billion people strong and counting. But then whatever industry you’re trying to sell to or be a part of, whatever community that you’re engaged in that’s already a network. And the better strategy is to figure out, Where am I in this, who am I already connected to? Who do I need to be connected to? How can I chart a path from from me to them, etc? And when you when you start to do that, it looks a whole lot less like running around trying to just add people to your contacts on LinkedIn or email addresses under your phone, and looks a whole lot more like mapping the community that you’re a part of, so you can start providing value to that community and letting that value come back to you. And you know, a lot of us, when we think about growing our network, we immediately go to the sort of strangers approach, right? I’m gonna go try and meet new people, whether that’s at an event or whether that is cold calling, whatever is. I’m gonna try to meet new people, as opposed to knowing that inside of the network that we’re already a part of, there are people that we know but we haven’t talked to in a while. We call these in network science the weak or dormant ties. There’s people that are warm referrals. They’re one degree of separation out from us, and we can be introduced to them. In fact, that probably the funniest study in the entire book is looking at Is there truth behind Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and so and what happens is people train and connect, try and connect one actor to another actor through Kevin Bacon in six steps or less. And it’s possible, it’s also possible to do it without Kevin Bacon. In fact, there’s actually nothing special about Kevin Bacon. He’s a fluke of history in terms of being connected. He’s the 669th most connected person in Hollywood. But it’s good news for all of us. Right? What it suggests is that if you think about you’re not you may not be in Hollywood, but if you think about your industry or your geography as a network, you don’t have to have this incredible, super connectors network. You’re already probably one or two degrees of separation out from everyone that you need to meet and get to know. It’s just a matter of knowing what is my path to them, who could introduce me to them, etc. That’s that’s a much better strategy than thinking about like, Okay, I need to just add as many new contacts to my to my app as possible. It’s much more about going, Okay, I need, I know, I need these types of people. How can I get better connected to them?

Host
Yeah, is there anything specific that we should be doing with that information, or is it just more of like it’s about the mindset shift of going just nurture, spend time nurturing what you have, and work that not building a new network?

David Burkus
So I would say that’s the first part. The second is, as you’re nurturing the connections you already have, I coach a lot of people to get in the practice of asking the question, Who do you know in blank, with blank being whatever industry sector segment that you want to get to know more of now that’s different than what most people will do if they find out. Usually, they’ll wait till they find out that they have a connection to that one person, that amazing person that’s going to fill their quota for the quarter, or going to introduce them to the Hollywood executive that’s going to get them in a feature film. Right? We’re. When we think about that, maybe we even like we don’t even know we LinkedIn stock, and then it tells us we have this connection. Then we go to that one person and we beg for an introduction. A better approach is to sort of systematically be asking contacts we already have, Hey, who do you know? In blank, whatever that segment is, and let them come up with not just one person, but a list of names. Usually, that list of names is going to be people they would be comfortable introducing you to, and when you’re doing that to five or six different people and the same two or three names come up, that’s a strong signal, in terms of the network, that that’s the right person for you, and that that person is also probably different than the one that you thought you needed to get connected to. I mean, if there’s 7.4 billion people in the world, the likelihood that the person you think is going to transform your business is also the person that really is going to transform your business. It’s pretty small, so it’s better to have a very open edge mentality of I’m trying to explore the fringes of the network in its totality, and then we can figure out who are the right people to get connected to.

Host
Yeah. You talk about networking events. There is a term that you introduce called multiplexity.

David Burkus
Yeah, yeah. And the way to think about network meetings is sort of like adding fuel to the fire of doing this warm lead thing anyway, right? If you go, you’re going to accelerate that. But what a lot of people do is they run around and they ask, in my opinion, the wrong question they ask. So what do you do? Which it sounds like? It’s a great question, because it sounds like it cuts out of the small talk and gets to the heart of it. But there’s a 12. I call it a $12 word, multiplexity. And what it is in network science is it’s essentially a realization that even though a might know B, there are multiple different ways in which people can know each other. So when we have just one thing in common or one reason to connect, we call that a uniplex tie, right? So when it’s just work related, that’s a uniplex tie, if we work together, but our kids go to the same elementary school, and we also see each other at the gym. That’s a multiplex tie. There’s multiple different contexts in which we see each other, and the research strongly suggests that you will build a better and deeper relationship with someone faster if you’re building multiplex ties. So we go back to this question. So what do you do? The problem with that is, you’re at a networking event, especially you’re in a situation where the context is sending a strong signal that we’re supposed to talk about work. And then when you ask, so what do you do? You send a strong signal that that’s what I’m interested in talking to. The context is going to shift your conversation to work eventually. Anyway, so I advise people lead with a little bit different question, right? Something that’s open ended, something that they can explore. So this could be anything that feels natural but explores some other dimensions. So what excites you right now? Where did you grow up? I actually like to ask who’s your favorite superhero, just because you can learn a lot about somebody when talking about superhero, but anything that explores them from another aspect. I mean, humans are multifaceted creatures, right? And the way that you build a deeper relationship, stronger with them is is to be multi fascinated by the different elements of them. You get to know them better on multiple different levels. And you do that, I think, by starting with a little bit different question. It might sound like small talk, it might sound trivial, but you’re exploring other possible avenues and things you might have in common. And when you come back to work, you will have a deeper relationship, a stronger level of trust, etc, than if you just focused in on work related things. The key is you also have to be legitimately interested in the other person, right? Which is part of being a decent human being, but, but if you are, then there’s no reason to stay within those guide rails that we think we’re supposed to do of the so what do you do? Let’s exchange business cards. Let’s only think about each other in a work context. The other thing is that as you go throughout your whole the longitude of your whole career, you might actually find that your personal friends, the people that are connected to you for sort of non work reasons, end up becoming work relationships. And in friend of a friend, we tell the story of Whitney Johnson, who’s a brilliant thinker, a good friend of mine. Whitney’s biggest sort of thing, before she went as a writer, speaker, thinker, was she worked for an investment firm called Rose Park advisors started by Clayton Christensen, the brilliant mind behind disruptive innovation. How did she get that job? Well, she was working in Wall Street, but she got that job because she was serving on a committee at church with Clay Christensen. He got to see how she worked in that capacity. And that was the capacity that made him say, like, you know what, I want you to lead my firm when I started right, which is not you wouldn’t think that at all, like no one’s job. Advice is, go start thinking about the people that you know from church. But the truth is, people are multi dimensional, and you have no idea how those connections are going to pay off in the future. So be generally interested in all of the facets of someone, and it will not only pay off because you get to know them better and are a better human being, it’ll probably pay off in the long run, even in your career as well. If a knows B and B knows C, C is more likely to know a. In reality, too much. Transitivity is actually a bad thing, like when you have too many of the same, close connections, then you all kind of think alike, act alike. Everybody knows each other, so that even the introductions and referrals you’re going to get are very similar to you. So transitivity can actually be a bad thing. We need some of it because we have to have close connections, but we also have to monitor what’s my how much time am I spending with the same few people versus with the people that are further out in my network that I’m sort of rewarming those ties?

Host
Uh huh. There’s a concept again here in the book that you talk about; structural holes.

David Burkus
Yeah. So this is probably one of my favorite insights from the whole world of network. Science. Structural holes refers to networks between. We just talked about transitivity. That leads to sort of clustering. People tend to cluster off, right? So they cluster off by industry. They cluster off by ideology, like political ideology. They cluster for a bunch of different reasons. And what that creates over time is it’s almost like planets and space, right? There’s Earth and there’s Mars, and in between there’s nothing. Well, sometimes there’s the moon, but you know what I mean? Like, it creates a gap, an empty space in the network. And it turns out that the people who bridge that gap, who connect two communities to each other, who allow who become sort of an information flow between them, those are the people that end up creating the most value for both of those communities, and the people who generate sort of the most value for themselves, because they’re seen as that connector. And this is, you know, if you think about this in a rudimentary level, we know this in the sense of, like, if you work in sales, for example, you have the group of sales people. That’s a cluster, you sort of community of practice. Then you have the target market that you’re you’re working in. That’s another but do we ever think about, okay, what are the other clusters that are kind of connected to that target market, right? And some, some industries do this really instinctively. Real estate agents, for example, are great at knowing that they also need to be connected to the title company and the mortgage office of people. But the same thing works for sort of almost all of it. I cut my teeth my first job out of school, I was a pharmaceutical sales rep, right? And one of the advantages that I had was that there’s drug reps and then there’s doctors, but there’s also nurses, there’s medical device reps, there’s a couple different clusters that if I can start to bridge a lot of those structural holes, I can create a lot more value for everybody. And that spills over into my own career as well. You know, it’s, it’s social capital, right? This is a term that describes the value when a community is well, interconnected versus geographically dispersed, but also it’s the value that the person doing that spills over into that person doing the connecting, right? And, you know, I think the big takeaway, like TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE, is that, how can you be that person, right? What is the community that doesn’t exist, that needs to exist that would help your career, help your clients, help people that are doing something similar to you? You’ve got to go build that on the small scale as well. Because one of the things that we know from the research on structural holes and on social capital is that there is not a spillover effect, right? If you’re the broker, there’s a huge value that’s created for both communities and for you. If you’re one degree of separation from that broker, none of that value spills over, right? It doesn’t affect your career. Just because you know the person connecting, you have to be the person connecting. Where can I build that little bit of a community? Where can I connect to communities? Where can I be a broker, even in the small scale? Because it’s not enough to just rely on other people to always be giving you those introductions, but you have to be that person that’s actually connecting. And everybody can. This is not an introvert versus extrovert thing. This is not a How long have I been in my career thing? Everybody can begin to pay attention to the network that exists and start to connect groups and communities and even just individual people closer together that creates value for that network, and it will spill over to you in turn. What I love about the term social capital too is it works just like any other capital. It compounds over time, so you’ve got to make the little investments in it. You can’t just start withdrawing from it right away, like I can’t buy a mutual fund and then go I’d like to withdraw $100,000 from it. Doesn’t work that way. I have to actually have invested that amount of money first before I can do it. And networks, you know, they work the exact same way. And really, I mean, if I’m, if I’m going to be a little bit braggadocious, this is the big theory of the book too, which is, let’s try and connect these two communities, the people that study networks and the people who need to know how to network better. It’s not just advice. It’s, hey, I’m just trying to be that connector to, well, here’s the evidence based community that backs up all of the things that you’re advising.

Host
Yeah. How do you know, like you said, Kevin Bacon is the 669 connected person in Hollywood. What’s the process that y’all are doing to come up with something like that?

David Burkus
Okay, so, so in that, in that specific situation, the way that the researchers did it was they basically took the data from Internet Movie Database and basically were saying, If you acted together in a movie, that’s a connection, right? And so they can explore it’s a very sort of big data thing, right? Actually, Facebook, by the way, does the exact same thing. I know we’re in a bit of a data privacy and Facebook, but they actually, almost every year release a study that shows, based on the number of connections you have, like, how many bridges does it take to connect everyone in the Facebook community? And while it might be six degrees of separation for the 7.4 billion people who who are out there, for the 2 billion that have a Facebook account, it’s actually only four introductions. So it sort of shrinks it. So you look at it when we’re saying Kevin Bacon is 669 it’s because of the sheer sort of number of connections that he has. He ranks 669 there’s, there was a, I think the most connected one, if I remember right, was just sort of an actor that had been in a bunch of different genres, but not as a feature actor. So just sort of rotating around, but you’re building all of those relationships. The thing that’s most fascinating to me is that you don’t necessarily have to be that number one person. Even someone with as terrible a network as Kevin Bacon can create all the value in the world from connecting multiple different people and have that affect his career too. I mean, the guy’s actually been in a visa ad about Six Degrees of Kevin Macon, right? All because of this thing that just happened, even though he wasn’t the most connected. So everyone has this potential. You don’t have to be that super extroverted guy who knows how to work the room type person. We all have that potential. We just need to pay a little bit more attention to the network that’s around us and then respond accordingly. Actually, we dive into some of the research on really most of these online tools, whether it be LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or what have you, most of them are only really effective to the extent that they’re a supplement for your existing offline network, not a replacement for right? So it’s great to do it. It’s great to jump into LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups and interact. You also have to sort of be finding ways to make that connection a bit more personal before it gets really valuable there. We all know those people that spend a little bit too much time on it and not enough time, like doing whatever the hard work of getting in front of people is, we tell ourselves that, oh, I’m building my network. I’m just saying, like, No, you’re not. You’re just posting articles on LinkedIn and calling that network and like, That’s not. That’s a great supplement to help you with connections, but it is not a replacement for the old school ways, and it’s interesting in the age of technology and all this data, that that’s what we find.

Host
If somebody’s out there listening right now, is in the spirit of the action catalyst podcast, what is the first thing that you would have them take action on, in terms of implementing everything that they are are learning here and what we’re talking about?

David Burkus
The first thing I would probably want them to do is in line with a little bit of what we talked about, of what we talked about with the research on weak ties, which is, I want you to think of five people that you haven’t talked to in six months to a year, and I want you to do the work of reaching back out to them, engaging them in a conversation. You have my permission to wait till you find a relevant reason to do it, but you don’t have my permission to ignore making the list. Get that list made, put it in front of you, and when that you start to think about them, or you read an article that they’d be interested in, or you see them post something online about what they’re up to, that’s your reason. That’s your ramp to go back and reconnect with them and focus in on that first, because it’s more comfortable, but it’s hugely beneficial to not just you the overall network.

Host
All right, my friends, David Burkus is who you’re listening to. DavidBurkus.com and we wish you all the best.

David Burkus
Oh, thank you so much, and thank you so much for having me and for sharing me with your community. I really appreciate it.