The Business Angle

While listening to George’s Introduction to Networks and Valdis Krebs’ presentation Wednesday morning in Elluminate, I recalled Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. In the book, not only does he discuss strong and weak ties, but he denotes three kinds of people who spread “word-of-mouth epidemics”: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

I found the book to be a very interesting discussion of the way ideas spread, and my particular interest in reading it was my realization that a great deal of our understanding about networks comes from people in marketing. At the same time as I read this book, I was also reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which, although I was reading it to help my teaching, certainly noted many marketing examples.

Determining customer’s desires is what most companies do, in order, of course, to sell stuff. They also want to go beyond that to create demand where there wasn’t any. A great deal of the development of ideas about “networking” is associated with business: in fact, the word itself first became popular in a business context.

I don’t know whether that’s why I’m having trouble applying it to education? Certainly, whenever college professors are subjected to business models (I recall the Total Quality Management movement of the last decade), we wince and insist that what we’re doing is not commercial, and should not be subject to business motives, structures, or accountability. By “accountability” we mean the immediate quantifying justification of teaching, the inability of many people to realize what they’ve learned in college until many years later, and the difficulty in quantifying it even then.

So now we have an entire course that relates learning to networks, and thus by extension to business models, although I know that this is not the focus of research for folks like Siemens and Downes. But with Krebs, certainly, and the focus on six degrees and such, I see the spectre of TQM hovering in the background. I suspect a number of “the 2000” joining us here are business people, seeking to sell me not only products, but also ideas. Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but I think I’ll just review the Week 3 ideas for now. The main attributes of network are:

• Small Worlds (like six degrees of separation)
• Hubs: highly connected nodes (like Google, or the secretary’s desk at a school)
• Power laws: ideas of power being distributed fairly or unfairly, but usually unevenly
• Scale free: a large number of notes does not denote better connections
• Connectors: as in Gladwell’s book, people who spread trends through weak ties, although Watts and Dodds says that may happen more through people who are easily influenced
• Weak ties: I prefer shallow and deep to weak and strong, but the idea that people with whom you have a connection in only one area may be quite meaningful

Again, I can see all of these in business, and many of them socially. I’ll work on applying them as we go along.

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