Achieving Success Through Social Capital: Tapping the Hidden Resources in Your Personal and Business Networks

There are numerous books on "networking," with titles like "how to work a room." The theme is to get lots of names of people that you can call when you want to sell them something.Wayne Baker is a respected researcher of social networks. This book gives a step-by-step method of analyzing one's own social networks and through them, learning more about oneself. These social networks are not groups of people that you socialize with, but rather the core people that make up your life, your family, your co-workers and others. Having diverse social networks is a good indicator of many metrics of success and happiness. People with diverse social networks make more money, get promoted faster, ... they even get fewer colds. But how diverse is your social network? How can you improve it? This book shows how to figure it out and teaches about social networks while doing it.

This volume is one in the University of Michigan Business School Management Series. As Baker explains in the Executive Summary, "This book guides you through the process of evaluating, building, and using social capital." With precision and eloquence, Baker focuses on HOW to take full advantage of what he calls "hidden resources" in both personal and business networks. For example, in ideas, leads, business opportunities, financial capital, power and influence, emotional support, even goodwill, trust, and cooperation. Social capital consists of who you know, who knows you, and shared opportunities for you and them to derive mutual benefit. "The goal of building social capital as an organizational competence is the same as building it as an individual competence -- to increase the ability to achieve goals, fulfill missions, and make positive contributions to the world." Throughout the book's five chapters, Baker answers questions such as these:* What is social capital?* Why can it be so important to you?* How to measure and evaluate your social capital?* What are the most effective strategies for building entrepreneurial networks? (Baker suggests 30.)* How to derive greatest benefit from your own social capital?* How to build social capital as a competence within your organization?If you seek answers to questions such as these, this book is "must reading."

For over fifty years, I have tied my shoes the same way. Then last month while getting a shoeshine, the shoeshiner told me that I didn't have to double them in order to keep my shoelaces tied. He told me that if I tied my laces by looping the lace under, rather than over the loop, I would tie a "square knot" that would hold. Every sailor knows how to tie a square knot but it took fifty years for this knowledge to get to me.Just like tying your shoes correctly, there are many principles in life that we don't know, we don't know. For example, we have all heard the sayings, "It's not what you know but who you know that achieves success" and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" but most of us still believe in the myth of individualism. We embrace this myth and go about our lives believing that it is solely up to us to achieve success---without depending on the help of others to get what we want. Yet, as hard as we try, we can't seem to get it done alone.This new book explains that it's not just what you know (but that plus who you know) that determines your success in life. The book proves that the myth of individualism keeps us from using our personal and business networks to gain the resources we need to excel in life. Through reading Dr. Baker's new book (based upon principles like the "small-world principle" and the "law of reciprocity"), I found out about things I didn't know existed and how to use them to improve my life. This new book could be as important to my personal development as the social and time management principles I learned about when reading Dr. Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" several years ago.