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Networking Slingshots

After spending some time building and managing the network you should have a robust and solid platform in place. However, networking is all about leverage. It’s core purpose is to optimise your personal capital in the market by sharing and socializing what you have with other people so that they can in turn share and socialize your capital with their network. If this is the case then it will pay to understand what networks your members are part of and how you can leverage this cross connection. The goal is to bridge from where you are to where you want to be using the easiest path.

Imagine a spacecraft that has to travel to Jupiter. However it can't take a direct path because it would require too much fuel. Instead, the craft follows a complex roundabout routes called "tours" that take it past various planets and moons. Those bodies provide "gravity assists," commonly called "slingshot" trajectories, which enable the spacecraft to achieve the proper speed and heading as seen in Figure 7 .

Slingshot

As the spacecraft approaches a planet it is attracted by its gravity, speeds up (with respect to the planet), flies past (it's moving fast enough so it isn't held captive by the planet), slows down again as it's attracted by the planet's gravity and continues on its way. Net change in speed with respect to the planet: zero. But it has had its course changed by the slingshot effect caused by the planet's gravity. It is now flying in a different direction to that it was on before and with no additional fuel expenditure by the spacecraft.

It's a bit like grabbing hold of a handrail as you run down a flight of stairs to turn yourself quickly to reach the next flight of stairs heading down - you change direction by doing so. This was essential for the Ulysses spacecraft, which used a slingshot around the planet Jupiter to change its flight path out of the plane of the ecliptic (the plane in which the Earth and planets orbit around the Sun) into a polar orbit around the Sun. No spacecraft could carry enough propellants to do this with a rocket engine firing alone.

Network slingshots

In the same way, a key part of the networking model is to use the associated networks to slingshot through various connections. The idea is understand whom you would like to get in touch with as the final point of contact. Once you have a clear destination then it becomes a reality simple matter to plot a path to them using all your various connections as the slingshots.

Now although this might sound difficult, it is actually far easier than most people realise to get from point to point, even to people who seem very inaccessible or remote. The world is getting smaller all the time. With the explosion in network technology it is now possible to bridge a contact with almost anyone who has an e-mail address. The result is that the degree of separation between you and people you want to meet has been reduced. The small-world phenomenon formalizes the anecdotal notion that "you are only ever six ‘degrees of separation' away from anybody else on the planet." Thus even when even when two people do not have a friend in common, only a short chain of links separates them.

This is neatly encapsulated in the Kevin Bacon Game. A computer scientist suggested that Kevin (not a major league star) was at the center of the movie industry.[i] He did this by challenging people to think about the following:

He suggested that no one who has been in an American film ever has a Bacon Number of greater than four. Elvis Presley, for example, has a Bacon Number of two. This may seem nothing more than a weird fact about a weird industry, but the suggestion is that it is a very strong example of an observable fact "small-world phenomenon or the fact that "you are only ever six ‘degrees of separation' away from anybody else on the planet."

Try not to think of your initial network as ‘the network’. Your potential network is the world and the current domain is just the launch vehicle that can give you access to your worldwide professional network. This really is abundance mentality taken to it fullest possible extent. This is where you see the world as your oyster and once you have that mindset then it really can become a global professional network.

As an example, think of your organisation or workplace. Now image the one person who is farthest from your reach but you would love to make contact with. Using a diagram like the one shown in Figure 9 place yourself on the left hand side and the person you would like to bridge with on the right hand side. Start to think about who you know that will move you closer to that person. Alternately think of the people who know the target and start to consider if any of them are close to you. One important thing is that the most obvious route may not be the optimum one. It might be that someone in your network who works in a totally different company may know someone who knows them. So try to be really divergent in your thinking and spread out all the possible combinations that will get to the target.

In the same way that extending your network can massively explode the value of your personal capital, expanding beyond your bounded network can take the level of amplification even further. However, netting-your-net takes energy and courage. Don’t enter it lightly and with the expectation that you can generate quick wins. However, when it works the pay-back on the investment can be quite phenomenal.

[i] Kevin Bacon, the Small-World, and Why It All Matters, http://www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications/Bulletins/bulletinFall99/workInProgress/smallWorld.html, Volume 14 Number 2

	· Think of an actor or actress.
	· If they have ever been in a film with Kevin Bacon, then they have a "Bacon Number" of one.
	· If they have never been in a film with Kevin Bacon but have been in a film with somebody else who has, then they have a Bacon Number of two, and so on.