1. “Centuries of immigrants” and “risked everything” were inspired by Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address. “Obama’s Second State of the Union (Text),” New York Times, January 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/politics/26obama-text.html?_r=1&sq=obama%20state%20union&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all
2. Ronald Brownstein, “Children of the Great Recession,” The Atlantic, May 5, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/the-next-economy/archive/2010/05/children-of-the-great-recession/56248/
3. Ibid.
4. The mother of all safety nets, Social Security is supposed to be funded by the federal government … a government that happens to be trillions of dollars in debt. If you’re in your twenties or thirties today, by the time you retire you’ll likely collect at least 25 percent less in cash than your parents did. (More-draconian analysts predict a young person today will get nothing.) Consider the Social Security tax that comes out of your paycheck like you would a loan to a second cousin who has a drug problem—you might get paid back, but don’t count on it.
5. “Cost-Cutting Strategies in the Downturn: A Delicate Balancing Act,” May 2009, http://www.towerswatson.com/assets/pdf/610/CostCutting-RB_12–29–09.pdf
6. Andy Kessler, “Is Your Job an Endangered Species?” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116340050218236.html
7. See the links in Will Wilkinson’s discussion, “Are ATMs Stealing Jobs?” The Economist, June 15, 2011, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/technology-and-unemployment
8. Alex Taylor III, Sixty to Zero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 14.
9. “Population of the 20 Largest US Cities, 1900–2005,” Information Please, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922422.html
10. “Address in Detroit at the Celebration of the City’s 250th Anniversary,” July 28, 1951, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1951: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1 to December 31, 1951 (Washington, DC: General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, Office of the Federal Register, 1965), 429.
11. Andrew Malcolm, “Obama Takes the Wheel from Detroit,” Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2009, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/03/obama-to-detroi.html
12. Statistics from Charlie LeDuff, “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?” Mother Jones (November/December 2010), http://motherjones.com/print/79151
13. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Duleesha Kulasooriya, and Dan Elbert, “Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change: The 2010 Shift Index,” Deloitte Center for the Edge (2010), 2, http://www.deloitte.com/assets/Dcom-UnitedStates/Local%20Assets/Documents/TMT_us_tmt/Shift%20Index%202010/us_tmt_si_shift%20Index2010_110310.pdf
14. Reed Hastings, as told to Amy Zipkin, “Out of Africa, Onto the Web,” New York Times, December 17, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/jobs/17boss.html
15. Rick Newman, “How Netflix (and Blockbuster) Killed Blockbuster,” U.S. News & World Report, September 23, 2010, http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/9/23/how-netflix-and-blockbuster-killed-blockbuster.html
16. Greg Sandoval, “Blockbuster Laughed at Netflix Partnership Offer,” CNET News, December 9, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301–31001_3–20025235–261.html
17. “Netflix Opens New Shipping Center; Lakeland Facility Expands One-Day Delivery to Central Florida,” PR Newswire, January 15, 2004, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1–131553666.html
18. Company 2009 10-K SEC filings.
19. Jeffrey Bezos, letter to shareholders, April 2010, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9Mzc2NjQ0fENoaWxkSUQ9Mzc1Mjc5fFR5cGU9MQ==&t=1
20. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t (New York: HarperBusiness, 2010), 49.
1. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 12.
2. The phrase “overcome by sameness” is inspired by Youngme Moon’s analysis of differentiation in her book Difference, Kindle edition, location 156.
3. See video of Chris Sacca and Kevin Rose discussing this point: http://vimeo.com/26021720
4. Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004), 35.
5. http://www.mhhe.com/business/management/thompson/11e/case/starbucks.html
6. http://www.jetblue.com/about/ourcompany/flightlog/index.html
1. Richard N. Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? 2011 Edition (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2011), 28.
2. Kevin Conley, “Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw at the Revolution,” Vogue, May 2010, http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/sheryl-sandberg-what-she-saw-at-the-revolution/
3. Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?” The New Yorker, July 11, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all
4. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2009/db20090316_630496.htm
5. See Jason Del Rey, “The Art of the Pivot,” Inc., February 1, 2011, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/the-art-of-the-pivot.html
6. Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company (New York: Crown Business, 1999), 189.
1. Adrian Wooldridge, “The Silence of Mammon: Business People Should Stand Up for Themselves,” The Economist, December 17, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/15125372?story_id=15125372
2. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 22.
3. Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 11.
4. Jeff Atwood, “The Bad Apple: Group Poison,” Coding Horror: Programming and Human Factors (blog), February 19, 2009, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/the-bad-apple-group-poison.html
5. Paul Graham, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,” PaulGraham.com (blog), April 2005, http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
6. David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 39–40.
7. Neil Rackham and John Carlisle, “The Effective Negotiator, Part I: The Behaviour of Successful Negotiators,” Journal of European Industrial Training 2, no. 6 (1978): 6–11, doi:10.1108/eb002297
8. Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
9. David Brooks, The Social Animal (New York: Random House, 2011), 155.
10. How is he defining weak tie? In the study, he uses frequency of contact as a proxy for how strong the relationship is. This is an imperfect measure: you may see your secretary or the doorman every day, but that does not make him a strong tie. Granovetter acknowledged that measuring the strength of a relationship is a broader “combination of the amount of time, emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” Subsequent research affirmed Granovetter’s original conclusion even while measuring the strength of ties with more holistic criteria. See Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited,” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 201–33.
11. Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1371.
12. Ibid., 1362.
13. Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1994): 113.
14. See Dunbar’s book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), as well as the Wikipedia entry for Dunbar’s Number, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number. Also see Christopher Allen’s nuanced parsing of the concept, “The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes,” Life with Alacrity (blog), March 10, 2004, http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
15. Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, “An Experimental Study in the Small World Problem,” Sociometry 35, no. 4 (1969): 425–43, doi:10.1109/TIT.2010.2054490
16. Hazer Inaltekin, Mung Chiang, and H. Vincent Poor, “Average Message Delivery Time for Small-world Networks in the Continuum Limit,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 56, no. 9 (2010), 4447–70, doi:10.1109/ TIT.2010.2054490
17. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exactly-what-to-say-in-a-first-message/
18. Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro, “Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 2 (2005), 447–504. doi: 10.1086/432782
19. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009): Kindle Location 2691.
20. See Stowe Boyd’s blog post (and the comments section) for more on this theme: http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/756220523/its-betweenness-that-matters-not-your-eigenvalue-the
1. Kimberly Potts, George Clooney: The Last Great Movie Star (New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2007), 50.
2. James H. Austin, Chase, Chance and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 69.
3. A paraphrased sentence from James Austin.
4. Bo Peabody, Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life (New York: Random House, 2004).
5. Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 53.
6. Ibid.
7. Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007), 88.
8. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 34.
9. Michael Eisner and Aaron D. Cohen, Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed (New York: Harper Business, 2010), 202.
10. Nicholas Carlson, “Jeff Bezos: Here’s Why He Won,” Business Insider, May 16, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-visionary-2011–4#ixzz1NsYA4QfS
11. Claire Cain Miller, “How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard,” New York Times, March 7, 2010, http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/how-pandora-slipped-past-the-junkyard
1. Reannon Muth, “Are Risk-Takers a Dying Breed?” Matador, June 13, 2010, http://matadornetwork.com/bnt/are-risk-takers-a-dying-breed/
2. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 29.
3. Anthony Iaquinto and Stephen Spinelli Jr., Never Bet the Farm: How Entrepreneurs Take Risks, Make Decisions—and How You Can, Too (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 78.
4. Stephen H. Shore and Raven Saks, “Risk and Career Choice,” Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy 5, no. 1 (2005), http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol5/iss1/art7
5. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010), 204.
6. Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It (New York: Back Bay Books, 2010), 181.
7. Ibid.
8. Aaron B. Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 98.
1. Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous Sysem (New York: Warner Books, 1999), 3.
2. Ken Auletta, “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?” The New Yorker, July 11, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all
3. Hagit Limor, “Anatomy of a Tsunami from the Center That Warned the World,” KY Post, March 18, 2011, http://www.kypost.com/dpps/news/world/anatomy-of-a-tsunami-from-the-center-that-warned-the-world_6179439
4. “Report: Hawaii Tsunami Damage at $30.6M,” Pacific Business News, March 24, 2011, http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2011/03/24/report-hawaii-tsunami-damage-at-306m.html
5. Nathan Bennett and Stephen Miles, Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 16.