I was passing by a ground-level office– Allied Professional Services – in Midtown today. I pass the building all the time, but I think the office is quite new, perhaps only a week or so since they put in the nice frosted glass windows and a door with various services the company provides stenciled on it. Today, as I was eating a slice of pizza (another post) and walking by the building I thought, “I would not know where to go to get a nice door like that, with good stenciled icons.” Of course, my ignorance is nothing if not impressive, but I was not even sure I knew someone who would know where to call to get this work done. That put made me think of the “6 degrees of separation” problem, but with a twist. How long would my chain of contacts to an experienced door stenciler be? How strong would that chain be? Is this even a different question from the common “do I know a person problem?”
At first I thought it was different, especially between different socio-economic circles, but now I think it might be the same problem. Perhaps there is not a difference between knowing “someone by name” and “someone by skill”, at least in terms of the length of the chain. The difference may occur on the level of semantics – “good lawyer” or, in today’s headlines, “good bank” are different from “John Smith”. I’d be curious to know if people have done reaearch into this question, and what their findings were.
How does this relate to anything useful?
As I constantly think of how best to work with my teams, this is an important, but largely unmeasured consideration. When forming the teams we formally look at the person’s skills, some relevant experience with a similar type of project or industry is helpful – but rarely measured. However, I do not think I have ever heard anyone say, “we must have 40 points of X experience and 60 points of Y exposure for every project we undertake in order to have 90% confidence of success.” We do a similar calculation with technical skills, but not much else. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that the MVPs on all teams are always the multi-faceted guys who not only know how to manage java heap sizes, but also where to get a projector on short notice and can talk sports/stocks/beer with colleagues and customers.