T HE ANTICIPATION WAS PALPABLE at the venerable New
England country club as men and women in sober business
dress arrived one crisp evening in September. At the registration
area, along with the usual name badges, they were given colored
dots to put on their lapels. Each participant was asked to choose
two colors of dots: one to match the industry he or she was cur-
rently working in (or had just left) and the other to represent the
one he or she hoped to move into.
The club was holding a “structured networking” event for
people looking to reinvent themselves, many of them managers
downsized out of high-powered jobs. I had been invited to talk
about using networks to change careers. People were footing a
hefty attendance fee because they knew intuitively what I was
there to tell them: that none of their existing contacts could help
them reinvent themselves. That the networks we rely on in a sta-
ble job are rarely the ones that lead us to something new and dif-
ferent. The purpose of the event was to put into practice the
famous “six degrees of separation” principle, whereby the fastest
way to get to people we don’t already know is through contacts as
far away as possible from our daily routine.
The colored dots were designed to simplify the communication
process, to replace the usual preliminaries, the “Who are you?”
