A network functions precisely because there’s recognition of mutual need. There’s an implicit understanding that investing time and energy in building personal relationships with the right people will pay dividends. The majority of “one percenters” are in that top stratum because they understand this dynamic — because, in fact, they themselves used the power of their network of contacts and friends to arrive at their present station.

In contrast to Pareto’s pyramid and Kuznets’s rollercoaster ride, its essence is a distributed network whose many nodes, larger and smaller, are interconnected in a web of flows.

To maximize innovation, maximize the fringes.
Encourage borders, outskirts, and temporary isolation where the voltage of difference can spark the new. The principle of skunk works plays a vital role in the network economy. By definition a network is one huge edge. It has no fixed center. As the network grows it holds increasing opportunities for protected backwaters where innovations can hatch, out of view but plugged in. Once fine-tuned, the innovation can replicate wildly. The global dimensions of the network economy means that an advance can be spread quickly and completely through the globe. The World Wide Web itself was created this way. The first software for the web was written in the relative obscurity of an academic research station in Geneva, Switzerland. Once it was up and running in their own labs in 1991, it spread within six months to computers all around the world.

In the Network Era — that age we have just entered — dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error.

Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them.

Wherever there’s a gathering of people, there is networking going on. My favorite place to network is the cemetery.

24 It is worthwhile to take a moment to understand the difference between a structural and a functional network. “Structure” refers simply to the physical anatomy of a network: how many neurons, how they are arranged, their shape, and so forth. A functional network performs a certain function; it may have to do with speaking language, or it may have to do with understanding language. Importantly, the structure of a network does not reveal its function, or vice versa.

Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with.

In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. — MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

In many ways, communications networks are like road systems: their purpose is to move traffic quickly from one place to another with minimum congestion. They therefore present similar problems to their designers. Speed is important, of course, and so is safety, which means essentially the same in communications as it does on highways: what arrives at a destination should bear as close a resemblance as possible to whatever left the departure point.

Networking isn’t synonymous with partying. If you’re doing it right, partying seems libraryesque in comparison.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.