Redundant Networks

Redundancy in Britain means unemployment. The redundancy rate is the unemployment rate. What I mean by redundancy is that your network has more than one link per node. After all being able to reach a connection through two or more other people is inefficient yet redundant and probably more effective.

Here's what I mean. If you, A, have only one connection, B, with the target, C, and you lose contact with B for some reason, you are no longer connected to C. But connection with B" But if you have two connections with "C", call them "B1" and "B2" and you lose your connection to B1, you're still connected through B2. Even better, you know C independent of either B1 or B2, the redundancy of your network is even greater.

Once a while ago I had a client in the Midwest and the Director of Marketing and Planning and I were very tight. I did several studies a year for them. I had tried, not not as hard as I should have, to cultivate another connection to the CEO but never did. One day my contact told me she was retiring but that she'd forwarded my material with a strong recommendation that they continue to use me on to her boss.

Guess what: about a month later I was told that they were changing to another firm. Not that my work was bad, just they wanted to try something new. I wonder how that person would have felt if their supervisor said they were letting her go, not that her work was bad but just because they wanted to try someone new.

Still, you have to decide how much redundancy you afford, either money, time, or attention. You can't be redundant with everybody.

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.