Alliances & Networking

"Networking" has been corrupted into a synonym for transactional handshake collection. That's not what alliance is. An alliance — in Hill's original sense and in the working sense — is a small set of people whose thinking you have ongoing structured access to, in both directions. The structure is what makes it different from a friend group or a contact list. There's a cadence. There's a format. There's an expectation that you'll show up to think about each other's actual problems with the same seriousness you'd bring to your own. Most people don't have anything like this. They have contacts.

Working on Alliances means being deliberate about who you give thinking access to and who gives you theirs. Dunbar's research suggests humans can sustain about 150 stable relationships and about 5 close ones. Five is small. If you don't curate, the slots fill with whoever showed up most often in your last decade. If you do curate — with intention — you can change the trajectory of every other pillar. Your mindset is downstream of your closest five. Your plans get sharpened by them. Your systems get borrowed from them. The five is the leverage point.

The failure mode is treating proximity as alliance. You see someone often, so you assume they're in your inner circle. That assumption stays comfortable until pressure shows up — a hard decision, a setback, a stretch goal — and you realize they were never set up to absorb that kind of weight. Alliance is structural, not proximate. The question isn't who you talk to often. It's who you'd want in the room when you have to decide something hard, and whether you've actually built the room.