Network

The network is the most elegant concept thought up ever. Something is elegant if it is simple yet pregnant with meaning. A network is just that. It's a set of nodes and links. Nodes are points and links are lines connecting the points.

People have been studying networks for over a century. Sociologists noticed that people tend to hang in groups and began to study that. Mathematicians find the network a very elegant model and like to do some pretty sophisticated math. Engineers study networks too. Power companies study "the grid." Traffic engineers study the road system which is a network with the intersections as nodes and the roads as the links.

Business consultants study the working arrangement where the workers are the nodes and the relationships are the links. Then there's the worldwide web which I won't get into. An uncle used to say that even a spider was smarter than him; the spider had a website and he didn't which shows you that networks exist in nature too. Bees have a well-defined social network. So do ants.

A big step forward was made in the middle of the 20th century when a researcher came up with a "sociogram" that allowed people to actually draw a network. You can't draw a very big one though because after you get past five or six nodes it gets harder fast to draw a network in two dimensional space.

The terminology is a mess. A node is also referred to as a vertex or a point. A link can be called a line or a connector etc. I just nodes and links. And you have directed networks and non-directed networks and ego networks and so on and so on. You have cliques and partial networks and so on. Every new researcher likes to create his or her own language.

And the amount of work already done is vast and getting vaster so fast that no one can get a hold of all of it. And you don't have to. A lot of it is so abstract and mathematical and irrelevant to daily life that unless you are a mathematician you'll never get it and not useful even if you did get it. And there are a lot of goofy terms, like betweenness centrality. As for me, my mind flips off when I see an ugly equation.

Thing is, you don't have to understand everything to help yourself. Just knowing some things about it will be helpful. For example, think of your market as a network. That's what it is. It's customers and their connections, nodes and links. And you can use that to understand how you can get your word out to customers and others and sell your products. You don't have to be able to compute the betweenness centrality of the nodes in your network find network analysis useful. Of course if you could, you'd probably learn more and come up with additional insights that would help you. Maybe not.

If you want to learn about social network theory without spending your life doing so, go to the Wikipedia article and follow its links. That should keep you busy.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.