The Tipping Point Read online

  Most of us, I think, shy away from this kind of cultivation of acquaintances. We have our circle of friends, to whom we are devoted. Acquaintances we keep at arm’s length. The reason we don’t send birthday cards to people we don’t really care a great deal about is that we don’t want to feel obliged to have dinner with them or see a movie with them or visit them when they’re sick. The purpose of making an acquaintance, for most of us, is to evaluate whether we want to turn that person into a friend; we don’t feel we have the time or the energy to maintain meaningful contact with everyone. Horchow is quite different. The people he puts in his diary or on his computer are acquaintances—people he might run into only once a year or once every few years—and he doesn’t shy away from the obligation that that connection requires. He has mastered what sociologists call the “weak tie,” a friendly yet casual social connection. More than that, he’s happy with the weak tie. After I met Horchow, I felt slightly frustrated. I wanted to know him better, but I wondered whether I would ever have the chance. I don’t think he shared the same frustration with me. I think he’s someone who sees value and pleasure in a casual meeting.

  Why is Horchow so different from the rest of us? He doesn’t know. He thinks it has something to do with being an only child whose father was often away. But that doesn’t really explain it. Perhaps it is best to call the Connector impulse simply that—an impulse, just one of the many personality traits that distinguish one human being from another.

  3.

  Connectors are important for more than simply the number of people they know. Their importance is also a function of the kinds of people they know. Perhaps the best way to understand this point is through the popular parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The idea behind the game is to try to link any actor or actress, through the movies they’ve been in, to the actor Kevin Bacon in less than six steps. So, for example, O.J. Simpson was in Naked Gun with Priscilla Presley, who was in Ford Fairlane with Gilbert Gottfried, who was in Beverly Hills Cop II with Paul Reiser, who was in Diner with Kevin Bacon. That’s four steps. Mary Pickford was in Screen Snapshots with Clark Gable, who was in Combat America with Tony Romano, who, thirty five years later, was in Starting Over with Bacon. That’s three steps. Recently, a computer scientist at the University of Virginia by the name of Brett Tjaden actually sat down and figured out what the average Bacon number is for the quarter million or so actors and actresses who have played in television films or major motion pictures and came up with 2.8312 steps. Anyone who has ever acted, in other words, can be linked to Bacon in an average of under three steps. That sounds impressive, except that Tjaden then went back and performed an even more heroic calculation, figuring out what the average degree of connectedness was for everyone who had ever acted in Hollywood. For example, how many steps on average does it take to link everyone in Hollywood to Robert DeNiro or Shirley Temple or Adam Sandler? Tjaden found that when he listed all Hollywood actors in order of their “connectedness,” Bacon ranked only 669th. Martin Sheen, by contrast, can be connected to every other actor in 2.63681 steps, which puts him almost 650 places higher than Bacon. Elliot Gould can be connected even more quickly, in 2.63601. Among the top fifteen are people like Robert Mitchum and Gene Hackman and Donald Sutherland and Shelley Winters and Burgess Meredith. The best connected actor of all time? Rod Steiger.

  Why is Kevin Bacon so far behind these actors? One big factor is that Bacon is a lot younger than most of them and as a result has made fewer movies. But that explains only some of the difference. There are lots of people, for example, who have made lots of movies and aren’t particularly well connected. John Wayne, for example, made an extraordinary 179 movies in his sixty year career and still ranks only 116th, at 2.7173. The problem is that more than half of John Wayne’s movies were Westerns, meaning that he made the same kind of movie with the same kind of actors over and over again.

  But take someone like Steiger: he has made great movies like the Oscar winning On the Waterfront and dreadful movies like Car Pool. He won an Oscar for his role in In the Heat of the Night and also made “B” movies so bad they went straight to video. He’s played Mussolini, Napol on, Pontius Pilate, and Al Capone. He’s been in thirty eight dramas, twelve crime pictures and comedies, eleven thrillers, eight action films, seven Westerns, six war movies, four documentaries, three horror flicks, two sci fi films, and a musical, among others. Rod Steiger is the best connected actor in history because he has managed to move up and down and back and forth among all the different worlds and subcultures and niches and levels that the acting profession has to offer.

  This is what Connectors are like. They are the Rod Steigers of everyday life. They are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. In Steiger’s case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self confidence, sociability, and energy.

  I once met a classic Connector in Chicago by the name of Lois Weisberg. Weisberg serves as the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago. But that is only the latest in what has been an extraordinary string of experiences and careers. In the early 1950s, for example, Weisberg ran a drama troupe in Chicago. In 1956, she decided to stage a festival to mark the centenary of George Bernard Shaw’s birth, and then began putting out a newspaper devoted to Shaw, which mutated into an underground, alternative weekly called The Paper. On Friday nights people from all over the city would gather there for editorial meetings. William Friedkin, who would go on to direct The French Connection and The Exorcist, was a regular, as was the attorney Elmer Gertz (who was one of Nathan Leopold’s attorneys) and some of the editors from Playboy, which was just up the street. People like Art Farmer and Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce would stop by when they were in town. (Bruce actually lived with Weisberg for a while. “My mother was hysterical about it, especially one day when she rang the doorbell and he answered in a bath towel,” Weisberg says. “We had a window on the porch, and he didn’t have a key, so the window was always left open for him. There were a lot of rooms in that house, and a lot of people stayed there and I didn’t know they were there. I never could stand his jokes. I didn’t really like his act. I couldn’t stand all the words he was using.”) After The Paper folded, Lois took a job doing public relations for an injury rehabilitation institute. From there, she went to work for a public interest law firm called BPI, and while at BPI she became obsessed with the fact that Chicago’s parks were crumbling and neglected, so she gathered together a motley collection of nature lovers, historians, civic activists, and housewives and founded a lobbying group called Friends of the Parks. Then she became alarmed because a commuter railroad that ran along the south shore of Lake Michigan—from South Bend to Chicago—was about to shut down, so she gathered together a motley collection of railway enthusiasts, environmentalists, and commuters and founded South Shore Recreation, and saved the railroad. Then she became executive director of the Chicago Council of Lawyers, a progressive legal group. Then she ran a local congressman’s campaign. Then she got the position of director of special events for the first black mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington. Then she quit government and opened a small stand in a flea market. Then she went to work for Mayor Richard Daley—where she is to this day—as Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.

  If you go through that history and keep count, the number of worlds that Lois has belonged to comes to eight: the actors, the writers, the doctors, the lawyers, the park lovers, the politicians, the railroad buffs, and the flea market aficionados. When I asked Weisberg to make her own list, she came up with ten, because she added the architects and the hospitality industry people she works with in her current job. But she was probably being mo
dest, because if you looked harder at Weisberg’s life you could probably subdivide her experiences into fifteen or twenty worlds. They aren’t separate worlds, though. The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.

  Once—and this would have been in the mid 1950s—Weisberg took the train to New York to attend, on a whim, the Science Fiction Writers Convention, where she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Weisberg, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Weisberg recalls. “He said, is there anyone in Chicago I should meet. I told him to come over to my house.” Weisberg has a low, raspy voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice for those moments when she is. “I called Bob Hughes. Bob Hughes was one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke. He said, yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert—Robert Heinlein. So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, Lois...I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.”

  This is in some ways the archetypal Lois Weisberg story. First she reaches out to somebody, to someone outside her world. She was in drama at the time. Arthur Clarke wrote science fiction. Then, equally important, that person responds to her. Lots of us reach out to those different from ourselves, or to those more famous or successful than we are, but that gesture isn’t always reciprocated. Then there’s the fact that when Arthur Clarke comes to Chicago and wants to be connected, to be linked up with someone else, Weisberg comes up with Isaac Asimov. She says it was a fluke that Asimov was in town. But if it wasn’t Asimov, it would have been someone else.

  One of the things that people remember about Weisberg’s Friday night salons back in the 1950s was that they were always, effortlessly, racially integrated. The point is not that without that salon blacks wouldn’t have socialized with whites on the North Side. It was rare back then, but it happened. The point is that when blacks socialized with whites in the 1950s in Chicago, it didn’t happen by accident; it happened because a certain kind of person made it happen. That’s what Asimov and Clarke meant when they said that Weisberg has this thing—whatever it is—that brings people together.

  “She doesn’t have any kind of snobbery,” says Wendy Willrich, who used to work for Weisberg. “I once went with her on a trip to someone’s professional photography studio. People write her letters and she looks at all of her mail, and the guy who owned the studio invited her out and she said yes. He was basically a wedding photographer. She decided to check it out. I was thinking, ohmigod, do we have to hike out forty five minutes to this studio? It was out by the airport. This is the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of Chicago we’re talking about. But she thought he was incredibly interesting.” Was he actually interesting? Who knows? The point is that Lois found him interesting, because, in some way, she finds everyone interesting. Weisberg, one of her friends told me, “always says—‘Oh, I’ve met the most wonderful person. You are going to love her,’ and she is as enthused about this person as she was about the first person she has met and you know what, she’s usually right.” Helen Doria, another of her friends, told me that “Lois sees things in you that you don’t even see in yourself,” which is another way of saying the same thing, that by some marvelous quirk of nature, Lois and the other people like her have some instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. When Weisberg looks out at the world or when Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don’t see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don’t look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven’t seen in sixty five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

  4.

  There is a very good example of the way Connectors function in the work of the sociologist Mark Granovetter. In his classic 1974 study Getting a Job, Granovetter looked at several hundred professional and technical workers from the Boston suburb of Newton, interviewing them in some detail on their employment history. He found that 56 percent of those he talked to found their job through a personal connection. Another 18.8 percent used formal means—advertisements, headhunters—and roughly 20 percent applied directly. This much is not surprising; the best way to get in the door is through a personal contact. But, curiously, Granovetter found that of those personal connections, the majority were “weak ties.” Of those who used a contact to find a job, only 16.7 percent saw that contact “often”—as they would if the contact were a good friend—and 55.6 percent saw their contact only “occasionally.” Twenty eight percent saw the contact “rarely.” People weren’t getting their jobs through their friends. They were getting them through their acquaintances.

  Why is this? Granovetter argues that it is because when it comes to finding out about new jobs—or, for that matter, new information, or new ideas—“weak ties” are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. They might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools, or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn’t know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don’t. To capture this apparent paradox, Granovetter coined a marvelous phrase: the strength of weak ties. Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more power ful you are. Connectors like Lois Weisberg and Roger Horchow—who are masters of the weak tie—are extraordinarily powerful. We rely on them to give us access to opportunities and worlds to which we don’t belong.

  This principle holds for more than just jobs, of course. It also holds for restaurants, movies, fashion trends, or anything else that moves by word of mouth. It isn’t just the case that the closer someone is to a Connector, the more powerful or the wealthier or the more opportunities he or she gets. It’s also the case that the closer an idea or a product comes to a Connector, the more power and opportunity it has as well. Could this be one of the reasons Hush Puppies suddenly became a major fashion trend? Along the way from the East Village to Middle America, a Connector or a series of Connectors must have suddenly become enamored of them, and through their enormous social connections, their long lists of weak ties, their role in multiple worlds and subcultures, they must have been able to take those shoes and send them in a thousand directions at once—to make them really tip. Hush Puppies, in a sense then, got lucky. And perhaps one of the reasons why so many fashion trends don’t make it into mainstream America is that simply, by sheerest bad fortune, they never happen to meet the approval of a Connector along the way.

  Horchow’s daughter, Sally, told me a story of how she once took her father to a new Japanese restaurant where a friend of hers was a chef. Horchow liked the food, and so when he went home he turned on his computer, pulled up the names of acquaintances who lived nearby, and faxed them notes telling them of a wonderful new restaurant he had discovered and that they should try it. This is, in a nutshell, what word of mouth is. It’s not me telling you about a new restaurant with great food, and you telling a friend and that friend telling a friend. Word of mouth begins when somewhere along that chain, someone tells a person like Roger Horchow.

  5.

  Here, then, is the explanation for why Paul Revere’s midnight ride started a word of mouth epidemic and William Dawes’s ride did not. Paul Revere was the Roger Horchow or the Lois Weisberg of his day. He was a Connector. He was, for example, gregarious and intensely social. When he died, his funeral was attended, in the words of one contemporary newspaper acc
ount, by “troops of people.” He was a fisherman and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theater lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman. He was active in the local Masonic Lodge and was a member of several select social clubs. He was also a doer, a man blessed—as David Hackett Fischer recounts in his brilliant book Paul Revere’s Ride—with an “uncanny genius for being at the center of events.” Fischer writes:

  When Boston imported its first streetlights in 1774, Paul Revere was asked to serve on the committee that made the arrangement. When the Boston market required regulation, Paul Revere was appointed its clerk. After the Revolution, in a time of epidemics, he was chosen health officer of Boston, and coroner of Suffolk County. When a major fire ravaged the old wooden town, he helped to found the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and his name was first to appear on its charter of incorporation. As poverty became a growing problem in the new republic, he called the meeting that organized the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, and was elected its first president. When the community of Boston was shattered by the most sensational murder trial of his generation, Paul Revere was chosen foreman of the jury.

  Had Revere been given a list of 250 surnames drawn at random from the Boston census of 1775, there is no question he would have scored well over 100.

  After the Boston Tea Party, in 1773, when the anger of the American colonists against their British rulers began to spill over, dozens of committees and congresses of angry colonists sprang up around New England. They had no formal organization or established means of community. But Paul Revere quickly emerged as a link between all those far flung revolutionary dots. He would routinely ride down to Philadelphia or New York or up to New Hampshire, carrying messages from one group to another. Within Boston as well, he played a special role. There were, in the revolutionary years, seven groups of “Whigs” (revolutionaries) in Boston, comprising some 255 men. Most of the men—over 80 percent—belonged to just one group. No one was a member of all seven. Only two men were members of as many as five of the groups: Paul Revere was one of those two.