Linked Quotes

“80 percent of profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of consumers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on. It”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“In retrospect, Euler's unintended message is very simple: Graphs or networks have properties, hidden in their construction, that limit or enhance our ability to do things with them. For more than two centuries the layout of Konigsberg's graph limited its citizens' ability to solve their coffeehouse problem. But a change in the layout, the addition of only one extra link, suddenly removed this constraint.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“[W]e are all connected. Our biological existence, social world, economy, and religious traditions tell a compelling story of interrelatedness. As the great Argentinian author Jorge Louis Borges put it, 'everything touches everything.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“can you tell me where I can find a restaurant where you can eat for nothing?” “My dear man,” replied van Schmoller, “there are no such restaurants, but there is a place around the corner where you can have a good meal very cheaply.” “Ah,” said Pareto, laughing triumphantly, “so there are laws in economics!”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“If we were to construct a similar map for society, it would have to include each person’s professional and personal interests and chart everyone she or he knew. It would make Milgram’s experiment seem clumsy and obsolete by allowing us to find, in seconds, the shortest path to any person in the world. It would be a must-use tool for everyone from politicians to salespeople and epidemiologists. Of course, such a social search engine is impossible to build, since it would take at least a lifetime to interrogate all 6 billion people on the earth to learn about their friends and acquaintances.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“The mystery of life begins with the intricate web of interactions, integrating the millions of molecules within each organism. The enigma of the society starts with the convoluted structure of the social network. The unpredictability of economic processes is rooted in the unknown interaction map behind the mythical market. Therefore, networks are the prerequisite for describing any complex system, indicating that complexity theory must inevitably stand on the shoulders of network theory. It is tempting to step in the footsteps of some of my predecessors and predict whether and when we will tame complexity. If nothing else, such a prediction could serve as a benchmark to be disproven. Looking back at the speed with which we disentangled the networks around us after the discovery of scale-free networks, one thing is sure: Once we stumble across the right vision of complexity, it will take little to bring it to fruition. When that will happen is one of the mysteries that keeps many of us going.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Thanks to the rapid advances in network theory it appears that we are not far from the next major step: constructing a general theory of complexity. The pressure is enormous. In the twenty-first century, complexity is not a vague science buzzword any longer, but an equally pressing challenge for everything from the economy to cell biology. Yet, most earlier attempts to construct a theory of complexity have overlooked the deep link between it and networks. In most systems, complexity starts where networks turn nontrivial. No matter how puzzled we are by the behavior of an electron or an atom, we rarely call it complex, as quantum mechanics offers us the tools to describe them with remarkable accuracy. The demystification of crystals-highly regular networks of atoms and molecules-is one of the major success stories of twentieth-century physics, resulting in the development of the transistor and the discovery of superconductivity. Yet, we continue to struggle with systems for which the interaction map between the components is less ordered and rigid, hoping to give self-organization a chance.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“The diversity of networks in business and the economy is mindboggling. There are policy networks, ownership networks, collaboration networks, organizational networks, network marketing-you name it. It would be impossible to integrate these diverse interactions into a single all-encompassing web. Yet no matter what organizational level we look at, the same robust and universal laws that govern nature's webs seem to greet us. The challenge is for economic and network research alike to put these laws into practice.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Networks do not offer a miracle drug, a strategy that makes you invincible in any business environment. The truly important role networks play is in helping existing organizations adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. The very concept of network implies a multidimensional approach.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“The real legacy of the Internet is not the birth of thousands of new online companies but the transformation of existing businesses. We can see its signature on everything from mom-and-pop stores to large multinational agglomerates.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Hotmail enhanced its spreading rate by eliminating the adoption threshold individuals experience. First, it is free; thus you do not have to think about whether you are making a wise investment. Second, the Hotmail interface makes it very easy to sign up. In two minutes you have an account; thus there is no time investment. Third, once you sign up, every time you send an e-mail, you offer free advertisement for Hot-mail. Combine these three features, and you get a service that has a very high infection rate, a build-in mechanism to spread. Traditional marketing theories will tell you that the combination of free service, low learning path, and rapid reach through consumer marketing has put the product above the threshold, and that is why it reached everybody. Based on our new understanding of diffusion in complex networks, we now know that this is only partially correct. It is true that you have a very high rate of spread. But you have no threshold either. Products and ideas spread by being adapted by hubs, the highly connected nodes of the consumer network.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Outsourcing requires a tight integration of suppliers, making sure that all pieces arrive just in time. Therefore, when some suppliers were unable to deliver certain basic components like capacitors and flash memory, Compaq's network was paralyzed. The company was looking at 600,000 to 700,000 unfilled orders in handheld devices. The $499 Pocket PCs were selling for $700 to $800 at auctions on eBay and Amazon.com. Cisco experienced a different but equally damaging problem: When orders dried up, Cisco neglected to turn off its supply chain, resulting in a 300 percent ballooning of its raw materials inventory.

The final numbers are frightening: The aggregate market value loss between March 2000 and March 2001 of the twelve major companies that adopted outsourcing-Cisco, Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Apple, IBM, Lucent, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, and Nortel-exceeded $1.2 trillion. The painful experience of these companies and their investors is a vivid demonstration of the consequences of ignoring network effects. A me attitude, where the company's immediate financial balance is the only factor, limits network thinking. Not understanding how the actions of one node affect other nodes easily cripples whole segments of the network.

Experts agree that such rippling losses are not an inevitable downside of the network economy. Rather, these companies failed because they outsourced their manufacturing without fully understanding the changes required in their business models. Hierarchical thinking does not fit a network economy. In traditional organizations, rapid shifts can be made within the organization, with any resulting losses being offset by gains in other parts of the hierarchy. In a network economy each node must be profitable. Failing to understand this, the big players of the network game exposed themselves to the risks of connectedness without benefiting from its advantages. When problems arose, they failed to make the right, tough decisions, such as shutting down the supply line in Cisco's case, and got into even bigger trouble.

At both the macro- and the microeconomic level, the network economy is here to stay. Despite some high-profile losses, outsourcing will be increasingly common. Financial interdependencies, ignoring national and continental boundaries, will only be strengthened with globalization. A revolution in management is in the making. It will take a new, network-oriented view of the economy and an understanding of the consequences of interconnectedness to smooth the way.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“A much studied example is the sea otter in California. The otter all but disappeared during the nineteenth century because of excessive hunting for its pelts. After federal regulators in 1911 forbade further hunting of this lovely creature, the otter made a dramatic comeback. Because it feeds on urchins, with the increase in otters the urchin population went down. With fewer urchins around, the number of kelps, a favorite food of urchins, increased dramatically. This increased the supply of food for fish and protected the coast from erosion. Therefore, protection of only one species, a hub, drastically altered both the economy and the ecology of the coastline. Indeed, finfish dominate in coastal fisheries once dedicated to shellfish.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Most systems displaying a high degree of tolerance against failures are a common feature: Their functionality is guaranteed by a highly interconnected complex network. A cell's robustness is hidden in its intricate regulatory and metabolic network; society's resilience is rooted in the interwoven social web; the economy's stability is maintained by a delicate network of financial and regulator organizations; an ecosystem's survivability is encoded in a carefully crafted web of species interactions. It seems that nature strives to achieve robustness through interconnectivity. Such universal choice of a network architecture is perhaps more than mere coincidences.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Every network has its own fitness distribution, which tells us how similar or different the nodes in the network are. In networks where most of the nodes have comparable fitness, the distribution follows a narrowly peaked bell curve. In other networks, the range of fitnesses is very wide such that a few nodes are much more fit than most others. Google, for example, is easily tens of thousands times more interesting to all Web surfers than any personal Webpage. Indeed, the mathematical tools developed decades earlier to describe quantum gases enabled us to see that, independent of the nature of links and nodes, a network's behavior and topology are determined by the shape of its fitness distribution. But even though each system, from the Web to Holywood, has a unique fitness distribution, Bianconi's calculation indicated that in terms of topology all networks fall into one of only two possible categories. In most networks the competition does not have an easily noticeable impact on the network's topology. In some networks, however, the winner takes all the links, a clear signature of Bose-Einstein condensation.

The first category includes all networks in which, despite the fierce competition for links, the scale-free topology survives. These networks display a fit-get-rich behavior, meaning that the fittest node will inevitably grow to become the biggest hub. The winner's lead is never significant, however. The largest hub is closely followed by a smaller one, which acquires almost as many links as the fittest node. At any moment we have a hierarchy of nodes whose degree distribution follows a power law. In most complex networks, the power law and the fight for links thus are not antagonistic but can coexist peacefully.

In networks belonging to the second category, the winner takes all, meaning that the fittest node grabs all links, leaving very little for the rest of the nodes. Such networks develop a star topology, in which all nodes are connected to a central hub. In such a hub-and-spokes network there is a huge gap between the lonely hub and everybody else in the system. Thus a winner-takes-all network is very different from the scale-free networks we encountered earlier, where there is a hierarchy of hubs whose size distribution follows a power law. A winner-takes-all network is not scale-free. Instead there is a single hub and many tiny nodes. This is a very important distinction. In fact, Google's rapid rise is not an indication of winner-takes-all behavior; it only tells us that the fit get rich. To be sure, Google is one of the fittest hubs. But it never succeeded in grabbing all links and turning into a star. It shares the spotlight with several nodes whose number of links is comparable to Google's. When the winner takes all, there is no room for a potential challenger.

Are there any real networks that display true winner-takes-all behavior? We can now predict whether a given network will follow the fit-get-rich or winner-takes-all behavior by looking at its fitness distribution. Fitness, however, remains a somewhat elusive quantity, since the tools to precisely measure the fitness of an individual node are still being developed. But winner-takes-all behavior has such a singular and visible impact on a network's structure that, if present, it is hard to miss. It destroys the hierarchy of hubs characterizing the scale-free topology, turning it into a starlike network, with a single node grabbing all the links. And there is a network in which we cannot fail to notice one node that carries the signature of a Bose-Einstein condensate. The node is called Microsoft.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“The finding that real networks are rapidly evolving dynamical systems had catapulted the study of complex networks into the arms of physicists as well. Perhaps we are in for yet another such cultural shift. Indeed, Bianconi's mapping indicated that in terms of the laws governing their behavior, networks and a Bose gas are identical. Some feature of complex networks bridges the micro- and macroworld, with consequences as intriguing as the bridge's very existence.

The most important prediction resulting from this mapping is that some networks can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation. The consequences of this prediction can be understood without knowing anything about quantum mechanics: It is, simply, that in some networks the winner can take all. Just as in a Bose-Einstein condensate all particles crowd into the lowest energy level, leaving the rest of the energy levels unpopulated, in some networks the fittest node could theoretically grab all the links, leaving none for the rest of the nodes. The winner takes all.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn't only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdos and Renyi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them into the center of the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization. Gazing at the power laws that our little search engine carried home from its journey, we caught a glimpse of a new and unsuspected order within networks, one that displayed an uncommon beauty and coherence.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“The discovery that on the Web a few hubs grab most of the links initiated a frantic search for hubs in many areas. The results are startling: We now know that Hollywood, the Web, and society are not unique by any means. For example, hubs surface in the cell, in the network of molecules connected by chemical reactions. A few molecules, such as water or ademosine triphosphate (ATP), are the Rod Steigers of the cell, participating in a huge number of reactions. On the Internet, the network of physical lines connecting computers worldwide, a few hubs were determined to play a crucial role in guaranteeing the Internet's robustness against failures. Erdos is a major hub of mathematics, as 507 mathematicians have Erdos number one. According to an AT&T study, a few phone numbers are responsible for an extraordinarily high fraction of calls placed or received. While those with a teenager living in their homes might have suspicions about the identity of some of these phone hubs, the truth is that telemarketing firms and consumer service numbers are probably the real culprits. Hubs appear in most large complex networks that scientists have been able to study so far. They are ubiquitous, a generic building block of our complex, interconnected world.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“A subtle urge to synchronize is pervasive in nature. Indeed, it drives the firing of thousands of pacemaker cells in the heart and brings into synchrony the menstrual cycles of women who live together for long periods of time.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Euler's proof that in Konigsberg there is no path crossing all seven bridges only once was based on a simple observation. Nodes with an odd number of links must be either the starting or the end point of the journey. A continuous path that goes through all the bridges can have only one starting and one end point. Thus, such a path cannot exist on a graph that has more than two nodes with an odd number of links. As the Konigsberg graph had four such nodes, one could not find the desired path.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“A string of recent breath-taking discoveries has forces us to acknowledge that amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

“Open the "book of life" and you will see a "text" of about 3 billion letters, filling about 10,000 copies of the new York Times Sunday edition. Each line looks something like this:

TCTAGAAACA ATTGCCATTG TTTCTTCTCA TTTTCTTTTC ACGGGCAGCC

These letters, abbreviations of the molecules making up the DNA, could easily mean that the anonymous donor whose genome has been sequenced will be bald by the age of fifty. Or they could reveal that he will develop Alzheimer's disease by seventy. We are repeatedly told that everything from our personality to future medical history is encoded in this book. Can you read it? I doubt it. Let me share a secret with you: Neither can biologists or doctors.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life