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Studies by University College London anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests that the highest number of friends the average person can reasonably manage is 150 that's a lot of friends but inevitably you will find that even people with lots of friends have a small core group of five close friends, followed by an outer circle of roughly ten people.

 

Outside that there's another circle of 35 and another 100 outside that, says Dunbar, whose theory is called Dunbar's Number and is defined as, a theoretical limit to the number of people with whom any individual is able to sustain a stable or meaningful social relationship .

In reality, it doesn't matter how many friends you have on Facebook, your real friends are going to be less than 150.

A chunk of Dunbar's research centres around a belief by FORE-TEX founder, Bill Gore, who arranged his factories by staff numbers of 150 people because he believed that anything beyond that and his workers were less likely to collaborate and help each other out.

In a book about Flight Centre titled Family, Village, Tribe, author Mandy Johnson writes that organising the business into family, village and tribal groups is one of the main reasons behind the company's success.

It's a model most of us will be intuitively and instinctively familiar with:

Family: Made up of five or six people. The number of a Flight Centre branch or a squad of soldiers to name just two examples. Family groups depend on each other for survival.

Village: No more than 20 to 25 people, the village size is also the average number for a platoon of troops and rugby squad.

Tribe: The magic 150 number is all around us, not just in a company of soldiers or a GORE-TEX factory.

When you keep your business network small, it's easier to maintain visibility' with your network, which is key to success.

The founder of international business networking group BNI, Ivan Misner, advocates the continuum visibility (weekly contact) = credibility, which = profit as a successful approach to networking.

Here's how to do it:

Ingredients

Maintain regularly, weekly if possible, visibility with your network;

Keep the quality of your contacts high, and the numbers low;

Cultivate reciprocity by being quick to give; and

Make a genuine effort to get to know and help the people in your network.