More Tipping Point tips on the Law of the Few: Connectors

Connectors are people who know everybody; I advise reading Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg for a great description of a Connector. Connectors are particularly good at spreading ideas for the obvious reason that they talk to more people than you and I do. If I see a good movie, I may tell half-a-dozen people. If a Connector sees a good movie, she may tell half a thousand people. I don’t mean broadcasting, either, via a newspaper or email or some such; a Connector may well chat with five hundred people in the course of a month, simply because she is a Connector, and just happen to mention the movie in the course of the conversation.

I know one Connector; a former co-worker of mine had the pleasant habit of gaining acquaintance with people. He worked in a form of customer service in an office of a academic institution. Our workplace was, as many are, highly stratified. The faculty conversed, generally, with faculty, and with those staff who worked for them and those students enrolled in their classes. The support staff conversed with support staff, and with the faculty for whom they worked and the students they couldn’t avoid. Students conversed, for the most part, with students. Food service and custodial personnel were politely ignored. This is typical; at a corporate office those groups may well be senior management, middle management and staff, but I suspect it’s all similar.

David (my co-worker) spoke with everybody who came near the office. He remembered many, many names; he remembered favorite sports teams; he remembered fields of work or study; he remembered leisure interests; he remembered where the person grew up. “Oh,” he might say, do you know Robert? He’s from St. Paul, too. He works in Media Services, and he’s a great guy.” Or he might be talking to one person when another dropped by, and be surprised that they hadn’t met; they might be two faculty assistants in different centers, or a senior faculty member and a subcontracted custodian on her way to clean the toilet. It was impressive. I worked perhaps thirty feet from him most days; I might speak to thirty people in a week, and he might speak to three hundred. Part of that was that we had different tasks, but mostly, he is a Connector and I am not.

Several times, on Union business or office business of various kinds, I asked David to bring up a topic of conversation, or ask a question. It was always useful, and far more effective (and nicer) than email for broadcasting information.

By the way, David didn’t go to office parties, and avoided meetings like the plague. He didn’t socialize with his co-workers after work or on weekends. He didn’t (I’m pretty sure) maintain an extensive email correspondence. There was no flow chart or org chart that would have shown that we had a Connector; our Union only made use of that gift once I got active.

My mother, to go back to last post, was not a Connector by nature. She viewed the door-to-door stuff as an unpleasant but productive part of being on the Precinct Committee (which was not actually a committee, I believe); she did as much Connecting as she needed to do. Which brings me, again, to the question of whether Connectors are in fact different by nature than the rest of us. I suspect they are, at least more so than Mavens. Many people really dislike meeting new people; for them, trying to be Connectors would be like eating sheep’s eyes. It could be done, but ugh.

It’s tempting to suggest that it is easy enough to be a Connector on-line, but I suspect that’s false; the kind of person who sends emails to two hundred people a day is not a Connector but an asshole, and the two hundred people roll their eyes and delete the emails. Having a thousand hits a day to a web site is not being a Connector, any more than anchoring the CBS Evening News. Oh, I’m sure there are actual Connectors on-line, who do the same things with their on-line acquaintances as they do off-line. But the internet, despite making it easier for people to connect, doesn’t make us all into Connectors. Or, at least, not yet.

Some of the old Ward Bosses were Connectors, and some employed Connectors (a fixer had to be at least a bit of a Connector). Machine politics was, in large part, dependent on Connectors, who knew everybody and could reach anybody. Read a book on union organizing, and you’ll discover the Connector. In a sense, the decline of the parties dates from the point when the parties started relying on computer printouts, such as my mother had, rather than the gossip of the Connectors. Not that I’m against the computer printouts; they are an attempt to do the job of the Connector, a job that needs doing, and one that shouldn’t really be left to the chance of finding out that there happens to be one in the office next to yours.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.