In our book Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, Martha Rogers and I tried to convey our sense that as technology brings more and more "connectedness" to our world, our entire economic and social system is becoming more like a giant network. Whether you are talking about customers who are increasingly connected to each other, or employees and channel partners, or your portfolio of new product innovations, it is vital to understand how networks operate, and why.
Networks form by the rule of "preferential attachment," which means that each participant added to a network is more likely to be added by a connection to another participant who already has more connections. This is why influential customers become more influential at a faster rate than those who aren't influential. It's why the most visited Web sites gain visitors faster than others, and why wealthy people become wealthier at a faster rate than others. One consequence is that a small number of Web users exert an extreme amount of influence at many sites. The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article on this, "The Wizards of Buzz," in 2007.
In my posting a few days ago on this blog, Did Deregulation Cause the Financial Crisis?, one of Graham Hill's comments was that a financial crisis like this is, in reality, the end result of many different networked effects coming together in a kind of perfect storm. And this is a perfect example of the kind of randomness that an increasingly networked world is likely to treat us to.
So, if you really want to understand how networks will impact your business success as we become more and more connected, I'd recommend these books (in addition to ours!), and we've listed them sort of in order of increasing depth and complexity.
Continue reading "A Book List for Understanding How Networks Operate" »
