The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,18

it was a fluke that Asimov was in town. But if it wasn’t Asimov, it would have been someone else.

One of the things that people remember about Weisberg’s Friday night salons back in the 1950s was that they were always, effortlessly, racially integrated. The point is not that without that salon blacks wouldn’t have socialized with whites on the North Side. It was rare back then, but it happened. The point is that when blacks socialized with whites in the 1950s in Chicago, it didn’t happen by accident; it happened because a certain kind of person made it happen. That’s what Asimov and Clarke meant when they said that Weisberg has this thing—whatever it is—that brings people together.

“She doesn’t have any kind of snobbery,” says Wendy Willrich, who used to work for Weisberg. “I once went with her on a trip to someone’s professional photography studio. People write her letters and she looks at all of her mail, and the guy who owned the studio invited her out and she said yes. He was basically a wedding photographer. She decided to check it out. I was thinking, ohmigod, do we have to hike out forty five minutes to this studio? It was out by the airport. This is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago we’re talking about. But she thought he was incredibly interesting.” Was he actually interesting? Who knows? The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting. Weisberg, one of her friends told me, “always says—‘Oh, I’ve met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,’ and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she’s usually right.” Helen Doria, another of her friends, told me that “Lois sees things in you that you don’t even see in yourself,” which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don’t see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don’t look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven’t seen in sixty five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

4.

There is a very good example of the way Connectors function in the work of the sociologist Mark Granovetter. In his classic 1974 study Getting a Job, Granovetter looked at several hundred professional and technical workers from the Boston suburb of Newton, interviewing them in some detail on their employment history. He found that 56 percent of those he talked to found their job through a personal connection. Another 18.8 percent used formal means—advertisements, headhunters—and roughly 20 percent applied directly. This much is not surprising; the best way to get in the door is through a personal contact. But, curiously, Granovetter found that of those personal connections, the majority were “weak ties.” Of those who used a contact to find a job, only 16.7 percent saw that contact “often”—as they would if the contact were a good friend—and 55.6 percent saw their contact only “occasionally.” Twenty eight percent saw the contact “rarely.” People weren’t getting their jobs through their friends. They were getting them through their acquaintances.

Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas—“weak ties” are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn’t know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don’t. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties. Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more power ful you are. Connectors like Lois Weisberg and Roger Horchow—who are masters of the weak tie—are extraordinarily powerful. We rely on them to give