Welcome back everybody. This is Greg McEwen Show and I'm your host and today I'm going to share with you reveal perhaps the hidden strength of what sociologist Mark Granavator termed weak ties. By the end of this episode you will be able to understand the

hidden power of something you may have been overlooking, something that can help you to be more successful at work

To expand your knowledge your ideas your opportunities, your network.

So let's get to it. So, In the 1970s, in the 1970s,

in the

the the the, in the 1970s, while a doctoral student at Harvard, Mark Granavator made a groundbreaking discovery.

The discovery emerged from his curiosity about how people find jobs.

He surveyed 282 men, all in the United States, about how they got their jobs.

And he found, to his surprise, that it was a person's weak ties,

that is their loose connections, their casual acquaintances that were more helpful than the strong ones in

securing employment. In an interview in 2022 he said your weak ties connect you to networks that are outside of your own circle.

They give you information and ideas that you otherwise would not have received.

This piece of research formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation.

But over the past five decades, this paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, became Seminole.

It has achieved a quite astonishing 70,000 citations from scholars in the fields of business, economics,

psychology, sociology, with far-reaching implications in other disciplines as well.

50 years on, Granavator was interviewed by Professor Gruskey,

because it's worth reflecting on the distinguished career that he's had as a

luminary since 1995 in the halls of Stanford.

But note this, a staggering 90% of the citations of his work emerged post the year 2000.

90%!

So for 30 years there was just this relatively small number of citations, not nothing, because

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