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No matter how you get your promotion, the real reason your success could be up to your social connections. As University of Chicago professor Ron Burt has found, your network predicts your career success.

But instead of it being about size, a successful network is about its shape.

We tend to form clusters of relationships - people we went to school together, colleagues, people of similar interests. These clusters function in a very fascinating way. According to Michael Simmons who explains at Forbes, they get stronger as people form mutual friendships, establish norms, and gain reputations.

The relationships will act as an infrastructure through which ideas and opportunities may flow through.
Information goes faster and faster and gets repeated again and again--think about the inside jokes and lame stories that your friends keep repeating to one another. This leads to unwritten rules and normalized, reinforced behavior.

Infomation doesn't move between groups: Since you start speaking in shorthand--whether it's ROIs or ROFLs--you begin to be less intelligble to outside group. As a result, knowledge stays within one group and doesn't move into others. Burt calls this info "sticky": it stays in one place.
It is important to expand and make more clusters if you haven't already noticed what we're trying to get at. The more you live between clusters, the more exposed you'll be to different ideas. Read more about it at Forbes.

[Image: Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin]