The LAW OF THE FEW
If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point then you are probably familiar with The Law of the Few which basically says that a social epidemic is enabled by three main forces: Connectors, Mavens, and Sales[people]. If Netflix’s announcement on Tuesday is the beginning of a social epidemic to get Corporate America to directly break one of the most persistent systems contributing to the racial wealth gap (banking), then I wanted to provide insight into the few who helped facilitate it.
Every social epidemic needs a Connector and that role was filled by Yardstick Management and their founder Ebbie Parsons. Yardstick had been partnering with us since October 2019 to curate amazing groups of leaders for networking dinners. During these dinners, we engage in tough discussions like "Changing the Complexion and Composition of the C-Suite in Corporate America." It was during one of these dinners with this topic that the idea was born. In the virtual room, Tamika Curry Smith, Stanley Arnold, Valerie Williams, India Jewell, Terrence Herron, Ebbie Parsons, and I discussed structural issues and someone suggested that we figure out a way to get U.S. Corporations to move their money into Black banks. Yardstick also connected us with George Ashton III and Steve Hall from Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a critical connection, and they were essential to the creation of the Black Economic Development Initiative.
Mavens play the critical role of knowing more than anyone else involved about the thing being done. Shannon Alwyn on Netflix’s Treasury team played that critical role in making this happen. When my proposal first started circulating the virtual halls of Netflix, Shannon was the first to identify some of the challenges and over-generalizations. As a Treasurer, she knows the banking space better than anyone at Netflix and she quickly supplemented that deep knowledge through research. At the end of the day, we need to be able to execute on our intent, and Shannon along with her team at Netflix, Adam Geiger, and Gordon Beck, made sure we knew the space as well as one could in the 4 weeks they’ve been involved.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell says “In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is a select group of people - Sales[people] - with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.” I am not much of a salesperson in general but in the case of this initiative, I played the role. My job was to convince everyone I encountered that this had to happen, now is the time, and that it was very simple to do it. Saying it made it so!
I do hope that in a short time we can dissect this as a real social epidemic. I hope 10 years from now, as all the charts point to a closing Racial Wealth Gap and a growing GDP, we can look back to understand the conditions that made it all possible.
I am convinced that what we announced last week was enabled by so much of what so many others have done and I personally want to see all the authors of this new and better world get the credit they deserve.
