Last week the majority of our fifth year Veterinary students returned from the field (the farms to which they were posted for a period of three weeks) as the last leg in their formal Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine course. The major purpose of the attachment was to expose the students to on-farm conditions and situations which very closely resemble the kind of working environment they would be exposed to during their formal jobs. This time it was shorter than the previous 10-week period.
Just today morning some of them started submitting their bound reports outlining, among others, their experiences and lessons learned over the short period of time. I had earlier enumerated to them some of the benefits of the attachment but the one I feel I should have endeavoured to explain further, besides polishing professional skills, is the element of social networking. Last week and today, I got the opportunity of sharing with a few of them just one aspect of the significance of social networks in our lives. I used the analogy of airline routes and hub airports (local and global). I took an East African example considering Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi Kenya as our local hub and Entebbe International Airport in Uganda as one of the smaller ones. There are a few flights out of and into Entebbe than there are into and out of Nairobi. There are therefore lots of flights out of Nairobi into cities that do not have direct flights from Entebbe. It implies therefore that for a person in Entebbe to reach some cities aboard a commercial flight, s/he would need to go through Nairobi and get connected to the city of his/her destination probably even going through yet another hub airport like Dubai in United Arab Emirates. With travel, visa and airline tariff requirements met, the opportunities / possibilities of getting connected to many other cities increase with every airport / hub accessed or arrived at.
I decided to keep it that simple to illustrate the point that you may not have direct access to / contact with a person you would wish to deal with but may use a contact you already know to connect / facilitate your connection to the ultimate person of interest. Alternatively, your attention may be drawn to somebody you did not know but who somebody you know knows. The interesting thing is that you may not know, at the time of first meeting, how useful a contact may be later in life. I therefore advised my students to make sure they maintained the new contacts they had made and 'warned' them that such contacts might become useful for future working relationships with other parties they (students) would not have known (at least in two steps) if they had not met their current 'new' contacts. I know for a fact that even a mere exchange of business cards between non-acquaintances in a cocktail can initiate and extend social and business networks that could accelerate the speed of progress of a business or career development plan of the involved parties or their acquaintances. How much more would days of contact do?
I had also earlier advised my students to make sure their professional and social skills are missed when they leave the farms. My main interest was to bring out the fact that good work, good social skills that one practices will always be told as a story to other people. In this way, people or businesses have the power of the 'word of mouth' work for them as a marketing tool. Who will recommend a person whose good works they are not familiar with? Is there anybody living today who cannot attribute their progress or success to some social network?
It was interesting to learn that we live in a small world, so small that the average path lengths for social networks is only six degrees of separation - the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries.
Is it necessarily obvious therefore that a person who is more sociable will be linked to more social networks than one who is not? And will this subsequently reduce such a person's "degrees of separation"? Daniel Goleman argues that sociability, as an element of Emotional Intelligence (EQ), is a factor that contributes towards increasing the probability that a person will be an effective leader. Do we have a choice but to be sociable? Maybe not.
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