How do you become the one in between?
When I went to The University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2002, I was struck by one of the professors. During a lecture on social capital, Professor Ron Burt explained that most people tend to socialize in closed clusters: businessmen with businessmen, doctors with doctors, the military with the military, artists with art people, and so on. Over time, they become more and more entrenched in the ideas popular in their cluster and less and less open to ideas from outside.
But there is another type of person, the network entrepreneur. They are few in number and, unlike the others, they are able to travel between clusters and, most importantly, communicate with the locals in their language. It is no secret that a top manager and a designer, an investor and a programmer, a scientist and an actor often do not understand each other, as if they were inhabitants of different planets. Often they need a mediator-translator.
In the course of their multicultural journeys, network entrepreneurs are able to spot ideas that are trivial in one cluster but of extraordinary value in another. Knowing the languages, they deliver the message in a way that makes it stick. Like bees carrying pollen, they transfer ideas from one flower to another.
As a result, communities are enriched with new knowledge, opportunities and perspectives. Some network entrepreneurs build information bridges pro bono; others earn reputation or capital for themselves in the process.
In the olden days they were called dragomans or truchmen, that is, interpreters of spoken language. They, too, had an affinity for learning new cultures and languages. Since people have always been fearful and aggressive toward everything unfamiliar, the life of interpreters was dangerous. They must have been distinguished by their ability to think on the move — to listen actively to the interlocutor, to analyze a situation quickly, to make decisions in uncertainty, and to resolve conflict.
Still, the main thing for these mediators is openness to new experience and willingness to take risks for it. In other words, their curiosity is stronger than their fear.
Today, technologies like social media do not so much connect people as they do divide them. Along with agonizing media, they polarize people’s opinions, trapping them in tight clusters. To maintain sanity, survive and thrive, it is useful for each of us to develop the skills of a network entrepreneur, to be an interpreter a little more often. It is necessary to become a link between what has always been valuable and what can become so.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
Kyiv, 17.04.2022
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As a business therapist, I help tech founders with rapid business transformation. My specialty is accelerating decision-making at the intersection of business and personality.
