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How Unexpected Connections Can Lead To Surprising New Breakthroughs | Digital Tonto

When I arrived in Palo Alto for a publishing course at Stanford in 2006, I'd never heard of Srdja Popović or Duncan Watts—but their stories were about to become tangled up with mine. Facebook was just taking off and "social networks" were the hot new thing. I was running a sizable digital business, and it seemed that networks were something I should learn about. That led me to Duncan's work, and it immediately struck a chord. It felt deeply relevant to my own experience during Ukraine's Orange Revolution two years earlier. That's how I got hooked on studying change movements—and eventually, it led to my friendship with Srdja, who introduced me to his repeatable model for overthrowing authoritarian regimes. Over time, I kept digging. The more I explored, the more it became clear that Duncan and Srdja's work were deeply intertwined. I also began to see how their ideas could apply to business transformation—something I'd learned a lot about running media companies in post-communist Eastern Europe. In business, just like in revolutions, change rarely succeeds through top-down mandates. It spreads through networks. That's what led to the research that eventually became my book, "Cascades." Sometimes I joke that I stole half the book from Duncan and the other half from Srdja—my contribution being that Duncan knows nothing about Srdja and Srdja knows nothing about Duncan. But that's not really true. As the legendary mathematician G.H. Hardy once wrote: "The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them." Most people have never heard of my book—or of Srdja or Duncan, for that matter. But just as their work has made a difference for me, I hope mine has made a difference for others. Some have told me that it has. And they, in turn, can do the same for others. Slowly, slowly, we creep along—making progress where we can. Sometimes the world's problems can feel so vast that it seems pointless to try. But in doing what we can, we find purpose—and maybe help others find theirs too. That, I think, is what Camus meant by existential rebellion.