How to Connecting to people you don’t know ?

Connecting to people you don’t know very well leads to better networking and innovation.

The value of a close friendship is not to be underrated. We all want to have people around who we trust and with whom we can share our feelings.

But when it comes to work, if you’re going to be successful, you have to dump those emotional tendencies and work according to a different professional paradigm.

Sociologically speaking, your close friends are those with whom you have strong social ties.

But, if you cultivate ties with people you’re not so close to – that is, weak social ties – you’re going to be a better networker.

Typically, when we're faced with challenges such as looking for a new job, we reach out to strong social ties or seek out job listings online. What’s all too readily forgotten are weak social ties, and that’s a big mistake.

The problem with strong social ties is that they are often connected to each other as well as to you, like an interconnected cluster. In contrast, weak social ties tend to be connected to other social clusters, which means they'll spread news of your job search to entirely different groups of people.

In fact, a Harvard University student named Mark Granovetter showed this to be scientifically true back in 1970. He surveyed people making job transitions and found that 83 percent of those who were successful in their search had managed it with the help of weak social ties.

Interestingly enough, connecting with people you’re less close to also promotes innovation.

In 2002, Martin Ruef, a sociology professor at Duke University, set about asking 700 start-ups how they had devised their business models.

It turned out that practically all start-ups that had developed their business ideas from talking with weak social ties had more innovative business models than those who had relied on strong ties. This was indicated by the fact that these start-ups had, for example, filed for more patents to protect their original ideas. Additionally, Ruef and his researchers judged their ideas to be highly innovative when compared to business models and research typical of their fields.