Page 185 - The Power to Change Anything

174 INFLUENCER

people would cosign for the debt! That meant that Tanika had
to convince her four friends that her business idea would work.
More likely, she would have to work with them to create a plan
that they would first coinvent and then support.
What do you suppose happens when people who have
never worked a job, who are currently inches away from the
jaws of the grim reaper, and who are being asked to cosign their
new teammate’s note in case the business fails? They don’t put
up with any half-baked ideas. They create smart and workable
plans by uniting the intellectual capital of all five people in the
group.

ENLIST THE POWER OF SOCIAL CAPITAL

In Chapter 6, we learned that other people can motivate us in
profound ways. Now we add the second of the two social sources
of influence—social ability. As the Beatles suggested, we’re
most likely to succeed when we have “a little help from our
friends.” These friends provide us with access to their brains,
give us the strength of their hands, and even allow us to make
use of their many other personal resources. In effect they pro-
vide us with social capital. In fact, with a little help from our
friends, we can produce a force greater than the sum of our indi-
vidual efforts. But we can do this only when we know how to
make use of social capital—the profound enabling power of an
essential network of relationships. And Dr. Yunus has made use
of this power as well as anyone alive.
Popular author James Surowiecki explains why Tanika was
able to come up with her successful business plan. Surowiecki
would be the first to suggest that the idea he proposes in his
book The Wisdom of Crowds has been around for a long time.
In his very first sentence, Surowiecki points to British scientist
Francis Galton, who applied statistical methods to demonstrate
that groups—made up of people at all intellectual levels—often
perform better than any one individual.