Joseph B. Anderson, Jr., President and CEO of TAG Holdings, LLC was featured in the 2015 Crain's Detroit Most Connected List. The list recognizes 100 of the most influential business leaders, senior executives, and board members throughout the greater Detroit area based on the reach, centrality, and reliability of their connections.
Anderson credits graduating from West Point and serving in the U.S. Army as the foundation for all that came later. "It's the education and the leadership associated with it that sets you up for people to look at you as someone with the potential for leadership," he said.
Anderson said he was tapped later as a White House Fellow, something he believes never would have happened without West Point. And from there, he was courted by both Ford and GM.
Anderson picked GM's Pontiac division. And a GM opportunity -- serving on the Kettering University board -- led to a fellow board member inviting him to serve on the board of auto supplier Meritor. He also credits Harry Pearch, at the time vice chairman of GM and an Air Force Academy grad, with giving him opportunities.
Relationships and networks matter, Anderson said. "Of the eight or nine public boards I have been on only one was a result of a contact from a search firm."
The next major nonprofit role: Joining the board of Business Leaders for Michigan. "Friends I bird hunt with are on the
BLM board," he explained.
Anderson also credits other memberships -- from the Oakland Hills Country Club to the Executive Leadership Council, a national organization of African-American with C-suite positions -- for helping him make connections.
"My story may inspire some young African-Americans to get involved," he said.
The Methodology Behind the List
The Crain’s Detroit Business Most Connected Metro Detroiters list is a collaboration between Crain’s and
New York-based Relationship Science (RelSci).
RelSci used 13 major Crain’s lists to track a universe of more than 9,300 senior executives and board
members tied to more than 600 for-profit and nonprofit institutions based in metro Detroit. RelSci’s
research team then reviewed and updated profiles of the individuals tied to the Crain’s lists in the
firm’s data platform.
More than 30 algorithms were used to map connections between people and organizations through
past and present professional, personal and civic experiences. Both qualitative and quantitative factors
contribute to the strength of a connection, including job titles, length of employment, organization size and type of relationship.
RelSci further honed its criteria by considering five characteristics listed below to determine a final rank:
- Reach, or number of connections. This is the size of a person’s network.
- Reliability, or the strength of connections. This measures the quality of a person’s relationships.
- Influence, or links to highly connected people. RelSci weighted and combined its influence metric with its access metric before determining a person’s final ranking.
- Access, or links to highly connected organizations and their leaders. RelSci weighted and combined this metric with its influence metric.
- Centrality, or ability to connect two unconnected people. This identifies the individuals who serve as the best bridges between separate groups of people.
___________________________
Material for this article was taken from Crain's Detroit Business
