Obama – Get That Contacts Book Opened! 6 Degress Of Separation

If I have heard about the ‘six degrees of separation’ concept once I’ve heard it a dozen times. For the uninitiated here’s how it works…..you know someone who knows someone who knows someone (get the idea?)……keep going until you’ve got six ‘levels’ of people in the equation.

The theory is that you state the name / title of the person you want to meet at the outset and, by networking the six deep people chain you should, in theory, reach the person you want to meet via a string of networked contacts, many of whom you will not even know. But, I have a slight problem with this. Nowhere does anyone talk about the ‘quality’ of the introducers in the chain. What do I mean? Well, for example, if you are buddies with a street cleaner and that person happens to tidy the garden of the supermarket CEO (whose business colleague you want to meet), then might not the ‘chain’ break down at this point? The street cleaner tells his client big shot ‘Oh, you need to meet my buddy Phil. He is the head of a marketing company and wants to do business with your friend Bert who runs the multi million dollar turnover chemical company in New York’. Now think for a minute. Will the CEO of the supermarket pause before introducing his street cleaner’s friend to his senior management buddy? Maybe he considers his cleaning pal is the bees knees but I bet a silver dollar that he wouldn’t run the risk of introducing the advertising guy (who he doesn’t even know) to his ‘chemical’ business buddy……JUST IN CASE THE MAN DOES NOT LIVE UP TO THE PROMISED EXPECTATION of the cleaner guy. Remember….he probably doesn’t know the advertising guy and is staking his OWN reputation on the introduction which has come from a STREET CLEANER. I really believe that if you want to make the six degrees rule work, then you have to find like minded introducers from a similar business background. This is not about snobbery, it’s about hard edged business reality. There will always be exceptions to the rule, however, I am equally sure that whilst President  Obama may open his contact book to Vladimir Putin of Russia and vice versa, just ask yourself, whether he would do the same for a lesser colleague……or might he be fearful of damaging his own reputation by being over zealous in his networking without doing a few checks first!