I have been watching the traffic increase on this blog.  Within the first couple of days the traffic doubled.  In another week it doubled again.  Within the first month it doubled again.  The site is now approaching another doubling.  I find it fascinating how through person to person contact the word is getting out on mine and Chris Brady’s Leadership Blogs.  The Launching a Leadership Revolution book has taken off and we feel our blogs are a way to give back.  I have been reading about the concept of Six Degrees of Separation and have an idea.   The general theme is that the whole world is connected within 6 contacts.  You know someone who knows someone who within 6 contacts is friends with Michael Jordan.   Here is a short description from this website.

Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University in New York conducted a massive email experiment to test the theory of "six degrees of separation", i.e. that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties.

More than 60,000 people from 166 different countries took part in the experiment. Participants were assigned one of 18 target people. They were asked to contact that person by sending email to people they already knew and considered potentially "closer" to the target. The targets were chosen at random and included a professor from America, an Australian policeman and a veterinarian from Norway.

The researchers found that it in most cases it took between five and seven emails to contact the target. Watts says this shows that email has not fundamentally changed the way social ties are created.

"In this experiment, the internet is simply the tool we use to transmit messages," Watts told New Scientist, in an email. "Compared with offline interactions like work, school, family, and community, I don't see email as being a particularly compelling medium for generating social ties."

The concept of six degrees of separation emerged from a similar postal experiment conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. Milgram asked volunteers to send a package by mail to one of a hundred people chosen at random.

Let’s do our own version of the six degrees of separation.  We can connect the whole world to leadership training by utilizing the power of the internet and six degrees of separation.  Let’s see how quickly we can double the traffic coming to this site.  (I have never been accused of small thinking!) Everyone has hundreds of email addresses in their email address book.  Let’s select 10 leaders from different communities: church, work, hobbies, friends, families, etc.  Send them an email with the link to this blog.  Tell them why you are reading this leadership site and encourage them to create the habit for themselves.  If they enjoy the site encourage them to send an email link to ten leaders from their communities.   If our goal is to change the way people think—how much easier than a free website with leadership principles can we get?   If everyone participates, I believe we can double several more times.  This will help us influence and learn from a bigger and bigger community.  Who knows, but some of the top known leaders in the world will start contributing to this site. 

I have loved the comments added and have read every single one of them.  Keep up the great work and let’s see how many different countries and people we can route to the site utilizing the six degrees of freedom.  Over 20 different countries are visiting this blog regularly already.  Stay tuned for some more leadership principles coming over the next week!   Please share when you complete the assignment and let’s see how many degrees of separation the emails will go.  If we get to six degrees, we have theoretically reached the world!   God Bless, Orrin Woodward