It means from my mom through me, there is someone that is connected to Mark Zuckerberg. It also includes the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, the amazing artist, Marina Abramovic and entrepreneur without peer, Richard Branson.
That includes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (who unsurprisingly both outperform the general population).
So that means, according to network theory, that we are no more than four people away from anyone else. A team of data scientists working for Facebook crunched through the 1.6 billion strong membership of the social networking platform to reveal:Įach person in the world (at least among the 1.59 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half other people. Recently, Facebook announced that the world had become smaller – that the six degrees of separation that has been popularized through books, movies and hundreds of articles, had been halved. Sure there are other pressures and dynamics, but the human-to-human dynamic continues to create value for us all – and dominates our thinking and ways of doing business.Īnd it is this that makes me speculate – that perhaps the power to change our organizations, societies and cultures is less to do with the structures of power that we have come to accept, and more to do with an authentic willingness to focus on people. We build careers and companies on the relationships that we have with the most important people in our lives – family, friends, colleagues and partners. In leadership as in life, it’s the people that matter.