100 Trillion Connections

Here is an excellent article and podcast by Hermania Ibarra, INSEAD Professor and thought-leader in the area of professional networks for managers.

I’m not a daily blogger or blog reader and post and read in spurts, so this article is actually from May.  So some of you are likely to have already seen it.  I picked it up from Valdis Kreb’s superb blog.

Here are what I felt are the main points of Hermania’s piece:

There are three types of professional networks:

Operational - the people you directly work with to get your job done.  Most managers spend a lot of time developing these relationships and neglect the other two types of networks, which are:

Personal Networks - e.g., alumni, professional, social and affinity groups — these allow you to meet a diverse group of like-minded professionals.   Good for career moves, and to link you to new kinds of networks for your current work when opportunities emerge there.

Strategic networks -contacts with peers and senior people in your field —  toughest but most essential for leaders.   Look beyond your industry.  Strategic networks are crucial for sharing ideas about best practices, learning new approaches, keeping tabs on developments in business and technology.  Helps leaders see the bigger picture.

Managers often fail at networking because many people haven’t developed good network-building practices and skills and feel initially that they’re wasting time.   Also many feel that “networking” = using other people, or making superficial relationships.

The signs indicate that a majority of Americans are getting tired of bi-partisanship, and especially tired of phony positions and policies designed only to win elections (and to increase the power and wealth of the proponents).

The Radical Middle is one name for the movement to unite diverse perspectives into a collective search for truth and best solutions. (I first came across this term from an Utne collection in Sept. 04.)

Spreading a radical middle is a noble and necessary goal, but a tough one amid the natural complexity we all face, and the intentionally confusing noise of position jockeys trying to get votes and eyeballs.

What are the traits needed by those who can be genuinely respected by people from diverse perspectives? The main trait seems to be authenticity. In our complex times authenticity is, ironically, often expressed as irony. But there is also a type of authenticity that is much more simple and straight-forward. Just now I came across a relatively simple example in this excerpt of a review of a book about Willie Nelson:

“In parts of the country that are culturally and politically conservative — Texas being the most obvious case in point — he is often more likely to be greeted with a smile than a frown. Probably this has something to do with his passionate embrace of the cowboy myth … but my own hunch is that across the political and cultural spectrum, people simply understand that he’s totally genuine, devoid of artifice, and that this defuses whatever negative feelings they may harbor about the way he lives his life.”

A major key to success for the Radical Middle is the ability to defuse negativity. David Bohm, the renowned physicist and proponent of dialogue talked about the need… Continue reading ‘The Radical Middle, Willie Nelson and Authenticity’

Greg Berry’s post today highlights the need for better metrics in the social finance sector. He cites a recent post by Kevin Jones describing how one social venture fund refused to cooperate with another because it would mess up it’s metrics for the project it was investing in by making it hard to tell what factors were most important. Greg not only agrees with the absurdity of this situation, but also proposes an extremely interesting solution. The solution involves developing better standards for venture metrics, which his group has already at least partially achieved and tested. (Entrepreneurial Standards Forum.)

Good posts and good solutions. My limited experience is very similar: This type of uncooperative blindness is about a) competition for social investment “deal flow” which in turn helps attract more resources to invest, and b) simple self-absorption, sometimes confused with the need for “focus”.

It is interesting to see competition and self-absorption combined with idealism. As idealists, we always hope that … Continue reading ‘Ratings for Entrepreneurs and Investors’

C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan’s new book on innovation describes key principles as: Personalization of experiences; global collection of resources. (Thank you, Greg, for your nuancedintelligence.)

Experience = consciousness. Consciousness is above all holistic - the whole that is made up of a sum of a myriad of parts and is at the same time greater than the sum of the parts.

Consciousness in humans is brought about by having brains that continually collect new external inputs, analyze and combine the inputs into more sophisticated meaning patterns, combine the fresh, externally derived meaning patterns with memories of previously aggregated patterns to create new patterns, which as a whole form a personal consciousness (a flow of experience) of being alive in the world.

The new business imperative (competition/sustainability/innovation) to assist in improving personalized experiences from globalized inputs is part of an awakening of global consciousness on a whole a new scale. This is made possible by an explosion in connections. (Way more than 100 trillion.)

In business, as described by Prahalad in great detail, this is seen in the shift in strategic focus from products to services to experiences, and in combing products and services with real-time analysis and feedback to enhance the intelligence and experiences of business customers and individual consumers.

So this is a new idea?

Noo. Not new.

(Noosphere)

How is it that 66% of West Virginians are against mountain top removal, and yet their state legislature, which they elect, can’t (won’t) pass a decent law to stop it?

Does this have something to do with social media? Mountain top media? The media is on the top of the mountain and we’re way down here? Not enough connections?

Not just a West Virginia problem.   And yet, greed, though frustrating and baffling, is not the cause.  And we are not bad because we are ignorant and not well enough able to connect the dots.   We are connecting them; and it is getting clearer that this is in the interest of each and every individual bundle of experience and desires, and not just of a few.

Organization Networks

Organizations are social capital amplifiers. They collect social capital from the networks of all of their employees, funding sources, board members, partners, advisors, volunteers, donors, consumers, and suppliers. They can then focus social capital on a tightly integrated array of crucial projects that in turn affect the success of the whole organization.

Social media campaigns use social networks as a medium for broadcasting a message or collective action. This is “pushing power to the edges.”

Social capital networks also enable collecting and focusing social capital to accomplish precise tasks of a single team or a single professional working for the organization. This is collecting power from the edges to accomplish work needed in the center.

On the one hand, social media campaigns are becoming well used and understood. (For example, see Momentum: Igniting Social Change in a Connected Age.” On the other hand, using extended social capital networks to get work done within the center of organizations is less well understood and adopted – except by a relative few “networkers” in the organization. Likewise, the tools that can enhance extended social capital applications are far too under-used, largely because of lack of knowledge and focus on why or how to use them. As a result, this means that organizations can currently tap only a tiny fraction of their available social capital.

For more on social capital applications for organizations, networks, and multi-centered meta networks see:

Recent blog post on Types of Social Capital Applications

Short paper: Amplifying Social Capital in Organizations and Networks

Recent blog post on Facebook, LinkedIn and Usefulness for Organizations

Types of Social Capital, originally uploaded by DuncanWork.

The chart above shows four types of social capital that organizations can make use of. The four types are based on whether the social capital is collected and applied internally or externally, or in combination.

The chart also includes a partial list of different social media (“tools”) that can be used to enhance application of social capital in these four arenas.

“Externally derived” (or collected) means that the social capital is coming from trusted, reciprocal relationships that are outside of the organization; and “internally derived” means that the social capital comes from relationships that are inside the core organization.

Also, note that here I’m using the term “social capital” to refer to the help that people give each other freely (not based on contracts or financial exchanges) because of trusted personal relationships, shared values, affinity. Sometimes the term is also used to refer to financial capital that is invested based on social reasons rather than pure financial returns.

How useful is this way of looking at social capital?  My next post will also say more about this, and my earlier post on the different strengths of Facebook and LinkedIn also touches on this.

Irony can used to make fun of others (gentle or not). And I, like others, use it to make fun of myself, especially when there is something I want others to listen to and not dismiss, because I know that my thinking is incomplete, and that a million contradictions can be hurled at it. So I will fend some of those off by letting people know that I’m human too. Irony exposes contradictions between vision and reality. Visions are never big enough to encompass all of Reality (reality).

Too many visions take themselves too seriously. The problem is, they don’t fit together well. So it helps to soften the edges by exposing the contradictions, and by expressing openness.

But of course, irony can be used with the exact opposite intent - to shut down, close, dismiss. borglephyloxy.

A couple of days ago I saw a blog post from February (Mike Stenhouse, Trampoline Systems) that declared that (paraphrasing) “Twitter has replaced Facebook for me. It gives me everything I want from Facebook: Presence (stream from my friends). But on Facebook, I have to login a few times a day - their walled garden. But with Twitter: 24/7 Presence!”

What is the numinous appeal of Presence!

Is it a kind of love? Entertaining distraction? Sense of connectedness? The emerging Global Brain? Celebration of both uniqueness and common humanness?

Why? 20 -100 messages in a day (more?) from 10 different people (more?), some close, many not, some brilliant, many not. Why is this so comforting, stimulating, welcome?

Well, for one thing - it is attention from people I care about (and maybe some others) that requires absolutely nothing in return. Pure appreciation. I see it, laugh, nod, puzzle, or ignore it because, y’know, I’m really in the middle of something else - in fact in the middle of several things, and I have only so many neurons. But fine, keep it coming - feed my spare cycles - and soul - with quirk, you-ness, and relationship.

Is this what it is? (I’m still figuring it out.)

Prediction by Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems (from January - I just found it thanks to a friend): In 2008 “Many companies will commission pilots of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Most will fail to deliver any value.” He gives two reasons: 1) Consumer networking techniques don’t work for the enterprise, 2) “the pilots will too often be set up without connection to a pressing business problem. This means there will be little urgency around the use of the new tools and little benefit to employees from adopting them.”

I agree. But I would bet that many, including Trampoline Systems, are working on integrations between private enterprise apps and the more “public” consumer platforms. The two types of platforms need each other in order to reach their full potential.

Facebook and LinkedIn are both ‘consumer’ platforms, but they each have very different strengths to contribute to applications for organizations and private networks. Facebook is great for social campaigns and “pushing power to the edges” - using the network of the organization (or cause) to spread messages and collective behavior. This is why so many NGOs are using Facebook.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, isn’t so good for social campaigns - which come across as too much like spam to LinkedIn users, partly because it doesn’t have the right tools. But LinkedIn is infinitely better for using trusted connections for traditional, high-value professional purposes - getting jobs; finding funding; finding, reference checking and landing new employees, experts and prospective partners; getting new intelligence, and gathering influence. Facebook can’t do these because it lacks a decent professional profile database, and it doesn’t have the search tools for finding people 3 degrees out. LinkedIn can almost be used as-is by organizations - if only they knew how and why. Trampoline Systems can obviously add features that can make LinkedIn’s global network a lot more useful, without giving up control over private data.

Hello world! I’m happy to be here, alive, on this beautiful, tragic, sweet, evolving planet.