Marissa King - Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection

Not long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, a young Vernon Jordan interviewed for a sales internship at the Continental Insurance Company. The recruiter made Jordan, a sophomore at DePauw University, an offer. He was told to report to his new job in the firms Atlanta office at the beginning of the summer. When he showed updressed in his best suitand announced to the receptionist that he was ready to start his summer internship, there was a problem. The receptionist made a quick telephone call to the person in charge of interns, and asked him to step in.

Heres how Jordan describes what happened next:

The supervisor, a tall fellow who looked to be in his midthirties, came out. I introduced myself. Im Vernon Jordan. I was hired to be a summer intern in your office.

His reaction was not unlike the receptionists. But he quickly composed himself and took me inside his office. An awkward moment passed before he said, They didnt tell us.

They didnt tell you what? I asked, even though I suspected where he was heading.

They didnt tell us you were colored, he replied. At that time we had not yet become black. You know, he went on, youcant work here. Its just impossible. You just cant.

And he didnt. Jobless, Jordan was determined to find a summer position despite the fast-disappearing prospects as his college break wore on. Finally he landed a job as a chauffeur to a former mayor of Atlanta, Robert Maddox, who was in his eighties.

Jordans own eightieth birthday party was on Marthas Vineyard, an island dotted with gingerbread cottages that has long been favored by aristocrats. During the party, Bill and Hillary Clinton boogied to soul music. President Barack Obama, the actor Morgan Freeman, Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and American Express CEO Ken Chenault all showed up to fete the renowned civil rights leader and power broker.

Over the ensuing decades, Vernon Jordan had become a close confidant to presidents and was christened the First Friend by The New York Times. He had also built an enviable network of contacts in the business worldsitting on nine corporate boards including Dow Jones, Xerox, and Callaway Golf. As John Bryan, the former CEO of Sara Lee, said, Vernon probably knows more corporate executives than anyone in America. To jaded detractors, Jordan is emblematic of the problems created by the coziness of Wall Street and the White House. His rebuttal is that it is not a crime to be close to Wall Street... If you are a politician, you have to have relationships with every kind of entity.

Jordan lies at the center of the inner circle, a name given by Wharton professor Michael Useem to describe the connections between corporations created by the business elite. The shortest route between any two companies on the S&P 500 was Vernon Jordan. According to Johan Chu, at the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business, This network remained highly connected throughout the twentieth century, serving as a mechanism for the rapid diffusion of information and practices and promoting elite cohesion.

Jordan represents both the power and the perceived problems of networks. His unparalleled ability to network allowed the grandson of a sharecropper to become one of the most connected men in America. Jordan was the civil rights movements ambassador to boardrooms. Henry Louis Gates predicted that historians will remember Vernon Jordan as the Rosa Parks of Wall Street. But many find the backroom handshakes that his career has been built on morally dubious.

How exactly did Vernon Jordan land at the epicenter of the professional and political elite? He gives a hint in a 2012 commencement address in which he quotes Melville:

We cannot live for ourselves alone

Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads

And along these sympathetic fibers

Our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

To understand Vernon Jordans transformation, we need to be able to trace the thousands of invisible threads he spun together.

The Melville quote is more than an inspiration, its a new lens that we can apply to the idea of networks. The structure of someones network is a map that tells what their life has been like up to this point and where they are going. As a network analyst, sociologist, and professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, Ive spent the last fifteen years studying how peoples social networks evolve, what they look like, and what that means for their ability to succeed in the workplace, be happy and healthy, and find personal fulfillment. Vernon Jordan has a rare and special kind of network. To grasp its features, we have to first understand some more common building blocks.