Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

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Sunday, July 30, 2006

Visualization and Sensemaking

I should be working on Net Work, but just came on a co-incident point between my writing and a research project I'm working on for a client. For the book, I include visualization as one of the means by which we make sense of our networks. Obviously, organizational network analysis and value network analysis are two that are firmly in my toolkit. I've been less attentive to developments in the technology space. My client project includes research into "knowledge discovery" tools as a component of a knowledge management strategy. The list provided to me as a starting point includes various forms of visualization technologies. This morning, as I was reading Anecdote, and followed Shawn Callahan's link to Gapminder. (Shawn also mentioned Edward Tufte's new book, Envisioning Information, which is a "must have" book, as are all his works.)

As always, I love it when the threads come together.

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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Building "Virtual" Networks in Corporations

I've just had the pleasure, over the past couple of months, to collaborate with Nancy Settle-Murphy on articles for the Chrysalis newsletter, Communique. The second of two articles, Real-time conversations crucial for networking in a virtual world, was posted today. The first article, Networking in a virtual world an essential skill for success, was published in May and I was remiss in posting a link.

Nancy specializes in coaching virtual teams, working with managers and the teams themselves to develop productive relationships across cultures and time zones. I've known Nancy for many years (we worked together at Digital Equipment); she and I reconnected at a Boston ODLG meeting last year when Bruce Hoppe and I presented on ONA/SNA (Bruce blogged this in April, 2005). "Virtual" is a funny word for me right now, as I'm deep into writing Net Work, and the distinction virtual works for online communities as well as distributed communities, but there's a difference and I've not yet found the right pair of words to signify the difference.

When Nancy suggested we co-author some articles about how to network in a globally distributed organization, I accepted immediately. Fortunately, Nancy and I live in neighboring towns and we were able to co-create in person. What a treat! Nancy is terrific at exploring and prompting ideas I didn't even know I had. For this month's newsletter, she got me thinking about the root model of conversations, and the conversation and the content of the article flowed from there. Kudos to Nancy for her excellent writing (I take no credit beyond participating in the conversations that created the content and offering editorial suggestions and changes) and seeing a possibility for relatedness.

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Saturday, July 22, 2006

A regional dis-advantage

I spent some time today looking at a book chapter, "Silicon Valley Networks," from The Silicon Valley Edge. This chapter is by Emilio J Castilla, Hokyu Hwang, Ellen Granovetter, and Mark Granovetter.
They analyzed the social networks in Silicon Valley and how they contributed to the success of the Valley over time, with the kinds of social network maps you'd expect to see. But they also highlight the conditions of success of those networks, which were a unique blend of culture, mix of and interplay among educational institutions and high-tech startups (and the brokerage role of research centers), and the way that supporting business roles like lawyers, venture capitalists, and audit firms also became embedded in networks of their own. This was written in 2000, and I expect that they have continued the research, though I haven't come across it yet.

It was hard not to be reminded (especially since they referenced it), the 1994 book, The Regional Advantage, which notably contrasted the success of Silicon Valley at the time of the demise of Route 128. Although she is careful to point out that the true difference was between the industrial systems set up in these regions following World War II, author AnnaLee Saxenian, couldn't help but remark on superficial explanation that was current at the time: the "laid back" California had bested the "buttoned up" East Coast.

I was working for a Route 128 company at the time, and I remain on the East Coast, which has become more unbuttoned now around the Kendall Square area, where we have a similar proximity of universities, biotech and high-tech startups, and research collectives. But I do remember reading excerpts from this book at that time and being a bit sad, because I was in one of those vertically integrated companies that are governed by hierarchies, closely kept boundaries, and a code of loyalty. As a product of that culture, it took me quite a while to shake loose of those patterns, and some perhaps remain.

Also in 1994, there was a rumor that we'd be getting a Nordstrom in Boston, but the rumor was quashed very quickly. One of my co-workers laughed and said (in reference, I supposed to the notorious behavior of some of Boston's crankiest, sassiest, sharpest-toungued, surliest waitresses), "they probably couldn't find enough nice people to work there."

Nordstrom's is scheduled to open in Natick this fall (not Boston, but close enough). At least, that's changed.

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Monday, July 17, 2006

Relatedness and BlogHer

One of the reasons I used the word relatedness in my blog title when I began it is because of a women's task force I participated on in the early 1990s, when I was at Digital Equipment Corporation. The basis for the task force was a concern about the retention of talented women in the software engineering group, and the potential for improving the work environment such that women could achieve their full potential. The task force was called, in fact, the Stone Center Task Force, because we were also the "DEC project" for the Stone Center, whose research based on the work of Jean Baker Miller continues today at the Wellesley Center for Women at Wellesley College. I am often, in my research and practice in social networks asked if women are better at networks. Often, I say, "Often."

When I say, "often," it is because the research from the Stone Center suggests that women have a more relational view of the world and this has profound implications for understanding the differences between men and women. Baker Miller's groundbreaking book, Toward a New Psychology of Women, written in 1987, argued eloquently that because the study of psychology was based on studies primarily of men (by men), that women were frequently diagnosed with psychological disorders merely because they were different. "Men and women are different," she said. By the mid1990s, and after the publication of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1993) and the popular Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus (1992) we no longer questioned this politically incorrect assertion.

Now there is BlogHer, which I am late to find, but finding resonant. It is a global, web-based community of women bloggers, whose mission is to "create opportunities for women bloggers to pursue exposure, education, and community." A nice article by Maura Welch appeared in today's Boston Globe. (I actually found the article while browsing BlogHer, not the other way around, in case you were curious.)

It's too soon to tell whether BlogHer will have the same impact on me as those bi-weekly dialogues which were searingly personal and ultimately personally transformative. But it's definitely time to tell Maureen Harvey, who initiated and led that task force, what a difference it made in my life. Reminds me of a terrific quote of Virginia Woolf I'm saving for Net Work: "I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

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Thursday, July 13, 2006

Intellectual capital, knowledge management, and value networks

I was doing fact checking for Net Work yesterday and wanted to confirm the timeline for the work on intellectual capital and knowledge management. I discovered a short history of the idea of intellectual and its evolution on Karl-Erik Sveiby's web site. Two interesting tidbits:

Fall 1990: Term "Intellectual Capital" coined in Stewart's presence
Jan 1991: Stewart publishes first "Brainpower" article in Fortune

In 1997, two books titled Intellectual Capital were published, one by the aforesaid Stewart (Thomas A.), and the other by Leif Edvinsson and Michael S. Malone. The latter is somewhat more academic, but it's hard to compete with Tom Stewart's witty, fact- and anecdote-based style.

Stewart, who became the editor of the Harvard Business Review in 2002, wrote his Intellectual Capital while at Fortune magazine, and The Wealth of Knowledge in 2003. Both books are classics and must-reads for those interested in the history of knowledge management.

Credit for the coinage of the term "knowledge management" rests with Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak. (Bill Ives did a nice post on the story they tell in their book, What's the Big Idea?, about their epiphany of hitting on the term.)

Naturally all these folks are connected, as are the memes of intellectual capital, knowledge management, and networks. At the time of the 1991 Brainpower piece, the social/organizational network analysis work was just getting started by Valdis Krebs and colleagues, so it's not there, but the article gave me the kind of goosebump you get when you realize the answer has been there all the time. Stewart quotes Ted Smith from US West: "Managing knowledge as an asset spawns a whole new discipline." The Xerox copier repairmen story is there, along with a prescient description of what we today call Human Capital Management -- the mapping of a company's intellectual assets with the strategic plan. The knowledge economy (I'm waiting for a Drucker book for his quotes from this same era) is summed up pithily in typical Stewart style:

The economic landscape of knowledge-intensive business can differ markedly from the familiar neoclassical world. "Buy land," Will Rogers advised; "they ain't makin' any more of it." But we make more knowledge every day... The greatest challenge for the manager of intellectual capital is to create an organization that can share the knowledge. Like money in a mattress," says Hugh Macdonald, "intellectual capital is useless unless it moves. It's no good having some guy who is very wise and sits alone in a room." By finding wasy to make knowledge move, an organization can create a value network -- not just a value chain.

Unfortunately, the archived version of the article doesn't include charts or paragraphing, but it's worth a read when you want to kick back and kick yourself for not getting it all sooner.

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Thursday, July 06, 2006

Diffusion of innovation and the diffusion of understanding

Net Work work slowed a bit over the 4th of July holiday, but I'm back into it, thickly. An interesting morning, thinking about using network analysis question techniques to find the opinion leaders and influencers in an organization. My inquiry relates directly to finding the opinion leaders so as to create a network of change agents for organizational transformation: "in a very large organization, how do you find the people who are the most respected and listened to during times of change?"

I posted the question to ONA-prac, to see what others have been up to and then did a search of the SOCNET archives. The SOCNET search didn't have much on the combination of "opinion leader" AND "change management." When I shifted the search string slightly I found that I should have been inquiring about "innovation" AND "diffusion." There's quite a bit on that, and I found some good work by Tom Valente, whose special focus is on the diffusion of innovation through social networks in healthcare and medicine. The basic principles are also described by SNA researcher Ron Burt , who says that opinion "leaders" are more precisely information "brokers" who are the edge of things rather than at the top.

It all, of course, goes back to Everett Rogers's classic adoption curve, which was the basis of Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. Network theory helps us understand the workings of how innovations spread across boundaries. Given a bell-shaped curve of innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, the network theory illustrates the role of the brokers in bringing new ideas from the innovators "across the chasm" to the early adopters.

Which brings me to the current issue of Harvard Business Review, and a fascinating article, Better Sales Networks. In this article, Tuba Ustuner and David Godes provide insights into what the personal social networks of salespeople need to look like for different phases of the sales cycle: identifying prospects, gaining buy-in and upselling, creating solutions, and closing the deal. The network maps provide an interesting insight into brokerage and closure. Open networks are needed for the first two phases, for getting access through weak ties to more prospects, finding people to support making the connections with customers and establishing credibility. The next two stages require closure of the networks -- bringing people together into a focused team to help craft a custom proposal and connecting the prospective customer with existing customers to cement the rleationship.

After I read this article, it occurred to me that here is another example of how understanding about the structure of personal, social, and organizational networks is starting to move from early adopters to the early majority. I pick up an HBR special double issue on Sales and think there may not be much to interest me, and I discover how the insights of this no-longer-quite-new field of network analysis are being diffused throughout the business world.

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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