🕸️The Strength of Weak Ties

Your close friends mostly know each other, so they mostly know what you already know. Your acquaintances move in other circles. The links between separate groups are therefore almost always weak ties, and it is across those links that new information, including news of jobs, actually travels. A community made only of tight clusters, with no weak links between them, can be warm inside and still unable to act together.

The bridges I actually have. Written on the sponsors page that weekend:

• Inside Halden. Callum, by way of Thursday lunch: Billing, and everything Billing overhears. Hélène in Customer Success, who knows which customers say my product's name without being asked. Bao, who is shared between teams and is therefore a bridge by job description.
• Outside. Anouk at Routewise. Leona. Yusuf in Izmir, whom I have never met and who has taught me more about supply chains than anyone on my floor. About 1,900 newsletter readers, which is weak ties at wholesale.
• The gap. Nobody in engineering leadership since Priya moved to Platform, and nobody at all on the committee. That is the list to work on, and it is not a list of friends.

• Read on Saturday 9 August, five days into 📂 Promotion case for Group Product Manager, with a blank page headed sponsors in front of me. The question I could not answer was who at Halden, outside my own team, knows what I do.
• In the middle of the afternoon Ines phoned from a lake to say Mateo had proposed. I finished the paper on Sunday, in a much better mood than I started it.
• Twenty-one pages, one diagram of three people, and an argument that gets better the longer you look at it.
• The title is the finding and also a small joke. The acquaintances you barely keep up with are structurally more useful for news than your friends are.
• I thought at once of Anouk. A few coffees a year, a competitor's badge, and she is the only reason I know what the market thinks of our carrier tools.