I'm reading an excellent book called The Tipping Point. The concept has tremendous potential to help in understanding marketing, but also, change management. As I move further into the book and its key concepts, I am sure I'll apply them to much more.
For now, I am sure that you are familiar with the concept of six degrees of separation. In some famous studies, researchers determined that everyone in the world was interconnected with everyone else by reaching out through a maximum of six different people in a chain.
According to the Sociology webpage at Columbia University:
"In 1967, the Harvard Social Psychologist Stanley Milgram sent roughly 300 letters to randomly selected people in Omaha, Nebraska with the instruction to get the letter to a single 'target' person in Boston using only personal contacts.
"Milgram gave each 'sender' some information about the target including name, location, and occupation, so that if the sender did not know the target (and it was extremely unlikely that they would), they could send the letter to someone they did know who they thought would be 'closer' to the target. Thus began a chain of senders, each member of the chain attempting to zero in on the target by sending the letter to someone else: a friend, family member, business associate, or casual acquaintance."
According to the website, we don't know that this theory of six degrees of separation is true, or not. You can help find out by participating in their study, the Smallworld Project.
Where this gets more interesting is that in The Tipping Point, the author tells us that only a couple of people delivered the majority of the letters received to the Boston target. From this and other studies, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, concludes that some people are "Connectors," people who just naturally want to know and associate with many other people. He believes it is through these "Connectors" that the majority of connections actually occur.
I have a couple of friends who are natural connectors; they seem to know hundreds of people they can call upon for resources. I'm not a natural connector, but I sure want to learn more about the concept.
Warmly,
Susan
Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.
5:34:05 PM
Six Degrees of Separation 
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