on the value of an MBA to your professional network

It’s been a while since I’ve written about MBA subjects, partly because that was all 5 years ago, and partly because getting a master’s degree in Computer Science takes up a lot of one’s time and energy.  Recently, my friend Madeleine posted an image of her Linkedin network visualized as a graph.  This was built automatically using the inmaps feature of Linkedin Labs, which is pretty nifty and is very pretty as well.  This tool integrates easily with other social networking tools, so in a few clicks, you have a map and you’ve tweeted, posted, and whatever-ed it to all your friends.  Here’s mine…

There’s a lot of interesting things to be seen in a visual representation of a people network.  Some points that I noticed in mine are:

• my closest friends from Seattle, affectionately known as “The Dummies” are fairly well separated from the rest of the network (just below me in purple).
• the people that I know who are the most successful professionally generally (but not always) have the most connections.
• despite working at Microsoft, Keane, Adobe, Saltmine and Washington Mutual in Seattle, the individual networks of these companies are nearly indistinguishable from one another, adding credence to the “it’s a small world” adage often applied to the Seattle tech industry. 
• while tightly connected to the overall Seattle network, my old company Saltmine seems to have split into two factions, which makes sense if you ever worked there.
• my wife is the big purple dot slightly below and to the left of me, isn’t hers a cute one!
• the Oxford MBA staff are more closely related to my professional contacts than the MBAs are, this makes sense as it’s their job to help us get jobs.
• working overseas for just a few years expanded the network quite a bit, the Barclays network (above me in green) is a significant portion of the overall set.

Most significantly, I can see that the network I built up in 1 year of Oxford MBA (lower left in orange) is nearly the same size as the network that I built up in 15 years of working in Seattle (middle right in blue).  This graph doesn’t show geographic distribution, but I’m sure the MBA network would be off the charts in this regard.

Did this network expansion add value professionally? 
This is hard to say. 
Pro: In the abstract, assuming there is professional value in knowing lots of professionals in diverse locations, my MBA abroad clearly added value. 
Pro: My personal experience tells me that I have never gotten any job via headhunters, newspaper ads, monster postings, or any venue OTHER than my personal and professional networks. 
Con: It’s also reasonable to assume that the majority of connections in a network are not particularly useful, and those that are useful will vary in their utility. 
Con: Further, given that people I have worked with are on the right side of the graph and people I have studied with are on the left, this graph may be interpreted to show that knowing a lot of MBAs hasn’t gotten me any jobs!
Be Honest with Yourself: Having invested significant time and money in building this network, it’s hard to avoid confirmation bias.
In summary: Combining my experience with the intuitions implied by this graph, I’m going to say: yes, this network expansion probably added value professionally.  Since it was a ton of fun building up, I’m also going to say it definitely added value personally. 
So, what the hell, get an overseas MBA already!