Six degrees of separation

In the late 1960s American sociologist Stanley Milgram was studying how ideas and information travel through the population and, in the process, inspired what has become known as the six degrees of separation. This concept is now widely known and cited often in both the business and cultural realms.

To demonstrate his theory, Milgram gave random people living in Omaha, a letter with the name of a stockbroker working in Boston. He told them to write their name at the bottom of the letter and send it to someone they knew who potentially had someone in their network that might be able to connect with the stockbroker. Based on the names listed on the letters reaching the stockbroker, Milgram found that most had got there in five or six steps – thus coining the term six degrees of separation.

This concept has fascinated people because it implies that anyone we want to meet is only a few acquaintances away from an introduction. However, if you explore this experiment in a little more depth, you'll see that it doesn't in fact suggest that everyone is connected to everyone else in a few short steps. In the Milgram experiment, over half of the letters were handed to the stockbroker by just three individuals. This suggests that a small number of people- let's call them supernetworkers- can access anyone in a few short steps. The key to gaining access to whomever you want is to be one of these supernetworkers, by maximizing your personal and business peer to peer networks.