Secret Musings on the Secret Set

As an enthusiastic reader—especially of books that relate to my particular passions (e.g. open source, leadership, emotional intelligence, etc.)—I spend my share of time perusing bookstore shelves. Spend enough time in bookstores, though, and you can't help but take some titles at face-value—which can lead to some funny musings…

Browse the financial section of any Borders or Barnes & Noble, and here's what you find: Shelf after shelf laden with titles like 20 Wealth-Creating Secrets for Business Owners; 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth; Secrets of Six-Figure Women; Secrets of Great Rainmakers; Secrets to Creating Wealth; The 12 Wealth Secrets. A person could be forgiven for wondering how—if the methods for "creating" wealth are so hush-hush—dozens of writers and business people managed to stumble upon these secrets.

Of course, slipping the word "secret" into a book title is an easy way to make your potential best-selling finance book seem exciting. A title like Wealth Starts at Home: And 15 Other Financial Secrets That Could Make You a Fortune says to the potential reader, "Yeah, it's that easy, and if you buy this book, you'll be privy to this confidential formula for success!" Knowing that you're one of a select number of people who have the key to fortune is surely a thrilling sensation—if only you could get those secrets to work for you… ("Of course they can work for you!" these books promise. "And for only $35.95, I'll show you how…")

An Amazon.com search for "wealth secrets" turns up 1863 results, which begs the question: Just how many secrets are there? Depending on which book you look to, there are anywhere from five to fifty (or more) secrets to creating wealth, becoming a millionaire, or running a fortune-creating business. Joe John Duran promises to illuminate 20 Wealth-Creating Secrets while Joe Vitale guarantees 5 Easy Steps for Creating Wealth, and T. Harv Eker (who, according to Amazon, is himself "still amazed he's a millionaire") can't quantify his information, but swears he can reveal the Secrets of the Millionaire Mind to any willing reader. How do these businessmen and writers decide on the number of secrets they have to share?

Common sense would dictate that the more secrets you have, the longer the book—and, presumably, the greater the hardcover sale price. But how much money do these folks need? If their secrets truly work, then the men and women who author these books must already be rich. Perhaps, though, it is a sense of charity that drives them to share their wealth-producing recipes. Out of the goodness of their hearts—and the thrill it must have given them when they first discovered that they possessed the answers for creating millions—they choose to impart their knowledge to the masses.

Of course, if that's the case—if these individuals are already rich and are writing their books for philanthropic reasons—then why not give the book away for free? Makes one wonder.

Simon & Schuster book profile

I was invited by Simon & Schuster to contribute to an upcoming book entitled In the Moment that profiles how effective leaders leverage their internal drive and ego in a positive way to enable great successes. Below is that submission.

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Helping employees unlock their potential can be a challenge for new and experienced managers alike. My own motivation to empower coworkers lies in the memory of an autistic boy on a theatre stage, singing for the first time in front of a rapt audience. The moment occurred at the People's Light and Theatre Company, an organization that provides arts education for underprivileged kids. As a committee board member, I had noticed the boy sitting on the sidelines through weeks of practice, never once joining in rehearsals. But on performance night, he spontaneously climbed onto the stage to sing with the other children, something having awakened the passion inside him. For me, the memory of that boy's song exemplifies what we're capable of when we tap into our unrealized abilities.

Having become one of the youngest directors and then vice presidents at Unisys--a worldwide technology services and solutions company--I learned that personal development is the key to the success of employees and of the firm. Starting as a co-op with Unisys during college, I rose very quickly through the ranks of the company. I was particularly enabled by an individualized personality and skills assessment tool that led me to seek input from my superiors, my peers, and my own employees regarding my abilities as a leader and innovator. That experience, and the self-awareness it brought, opened my eyes to opportunities to grow and to nurture my own hidden resources.

Ego is, in part, an acute self-awareness which, when untempered by a measure of humility, can lead to the downfall of an organization. But self-awareness is an integral piece of my business plan—and here I speak not only of my own self-awareness, but the self-knowledge of every individual in my business. When a person is aware of his or her strengths—including those hidden behind uncertainty or fear of failure—she can wield those abilities with more control and put them to better use. Once employees embark on a journey of self-awareness, they can begin to take the big-picture view, stepping outside their own field of vision and devising ways to work together in order to achieve the broader goals of the company.

As a manager, I put this theory into real-world use. Seeking to create an organization that actively invests in the well-being of everyone, I encouraged all employees under my guidance to develop an Individual Development Plan (IDP)—a tool that empowers employees to articulate goals and aspirations, and guides management to define the experiences necessary for workers to realize these aims. These were personal career goals, I explained to my employees. While the good of the company is never far from my mind, I also recognize that people have lives and interests outside of the company. I want to help employees leverage this momentum--this passion--to their own benefit instead of letting it come between them and their fullest potential. It makes sense for our work, our work environment, and each worker.

I realized an exercise like the IDP was risky; inevitably, some employees, after defining and discussing life goals, might consider it in their best interest to eventually leave the company. But I also knew that given the right support, employees will leverage their talents in a way that is ultimately good for the company. One benefit of the IDP project and the resultant increased self-awareness among my employees has been the de-compartmentalization of the company in terms of our approach to large projects. The tendency in large corporations is for specific groups within the company to keep to themselves—the engineers with the engineers, etc. But as employees become more self-aware, I am able to cultivate a collaborative environment in which individuals form self-selecting communities based on their own passions and skills. Much in the way open source technology works, individuals contribute their ideas, modifications, and suggestions to a specific project while the community as a whole decides what stays and what goes.

This collaborative business model not only produces more efficiency and a better product, but a system through which employees give and receive critical peer feedback. The greatest asset of the IDP, however, is the loyalty and commitment it generates from my employees. Consistently, my branch of the company attains some of the highest levels of professional satisfaction with the lowest attrition rates across the entire company. Open source is no longer merely a product of our efforts, but the lens through which I see my professional responsibilities. This fusion of product and process guides my desire to help employees tap into their own hidden resources.

Has social networking reduced our degrees of separation?

I’m curious as to how much more accessible everyone is from everyone else in our modern day Web 2.0 age.

Stanley Milgram conducted the first such experiment in the 1960s, which came to be known as the “small world hypothesis”. In the experiment, he sent letters to 160 randomly selected people in Nebraska and Kansas. In the letter was the name and both the home and work address of a stockbroker in Massachusetts. The 160 people were asked to forward their letter such that it eventually reached the stockbroker, either at his home or office. The caveat: send the letter to someone you know on a first-name basis who you think would be more likely to know the stockbroker (or know someone who may know the stockbroker) than you yourself. Each person along the “chain” was asked to add their name prior to forwarding the letter. And, it turned out that the letters reached the stockbroker in an average of six steps, hence the “six degrees of separation” concept. Actually, the term seems to be shared by both Milgram and Fringyes Karinthy, who in 1929, postulated that the world was growing “smaller” due to the amount of networking and social connections such that there were probably at most 5 connections between any two individuals.

Other experiments have since been done tracing emails between randomly selected subjects and a “destination contact”, which also seem to support the six degrees theory. In all the email experiments I’ve come across, the participants are only “allowed” to forward the email to someone they know … no “cold calling” or web searching allowed. So, in a sense, this isn’t much different than the Milgram experiment, so it doesn’t surprise me that the six degrees still holds.

Another interesting concept suggested by Malcolm Gladwell, in his fantastic book The Tipping Point, is that not all degrees of separation are equal because there are some people who are extremely well connected, a term Gladwell calls “connectors”. As a matter of fact, over half of the letters in the Milgram experiment reached their destination through the same three individuals. Gladwell’s conclusion: “A very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

However, if we take into account the social fabric that has been weaved together over the past few years with the rise of Web 2.0, perhaps the number of connection points between any two people has dropped. Perhaps the “need” for these super connectors is no longer required to get from any person to another. Of course, I’m certainly raising the specter of doubt over the definition of “know”. In an earlier post, I speculated that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think. How well can we really know someone else, particularly those people we’ve never met in person but only know online? Furthermore, can one argue that a username or avatar is the equivalent of first name / last name?

Interesting thoughts to be sure. So, what I’d like to propose is a new type of experiment that measures the connectedness of our current world as well as the “requirement” for super connectors to draw us together. [NB: I recently read a Time Magazine article in which a girl named Tila Nguyen (online name Tila Tequila) has over 1.5 million friends on MySpace. She’d certainly qualify as a “super connector”.] Perhaps a “starter experiment” would be to see what the average degree of separation is between any two randomly selected people on MySpace. In other words, if person S (sample) has n-number of friends registered on MySpace and person D (destination) has m-number of friends (that presumably differ from S’s friends) registered on MySpace, how many “connections” or “degrees” do you need to traverse between S and D? Do this for a large enough sample size and average out the number. I’m sure MySpace has the internal information (and technical infrastructure) already in place to perform this experiment. So, two key questions to answer: 1)is it still six degrees?, and 2)is there still a need for “super connectors” to pull us all together?