21st Century Organization

OQ and SNA - Borgatti to Kentucky

What's Your  OQ?  Just when you thought you had figured out your IQ and EQ (emotional - for anyone still looking for the missing link) along comes Organizational Quotient - coined by the savvy team at Katzenbach Partners, a New York based leadership consulting firm.

Featured in the July 23rd Fortune magazine story The Hidden Workplace Jon Katzenbach makes the case for people with high OQ as those who are able to "toggle between both power structures" - formal and informal of the organization.  The hidden workplace refers to the informal  social network which if mapped through social network analysis (SNA) reveals the  connections through which people get work done.  Ability to influence the informal network is a critical factor.

Several good business cases where SNA/ONA was used to decipher organizational issues are in the article: Raytheon, Procter & Gamble, Lehman Brothers and Fluor. While SNA and ONA are used with these organizations it is important to note that the Katzenbach work at Bell Canada used more traditional organizational survey methods to find 14 key individuals who demonstrated unique behaviors -

"committed, passionate, and competitive".  Through further interviews it was determined that they also engendered

... the ability to get people to trust them and to solve problems rather than complain about them. "These people have incredible influence," says Elliott. "It's like the [Life cereal] commercial - Will Mikey eat it?" The initial group then recommended another 40 associates.

It would have been interesting to see if these 14 people would have appeared in an ONA as significant nodes or hubs  in a network map and how strongly the 40 associates they picked were connected.

And today July 26th, Steve Borgatti,PhD one of the leaders in the field of SNA announced that he, his research and related consulting businesses are off to the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business & Economics. They have created the International Center for Research of Social Networks and Business - called LINKS  http://networklinks.org/

From their overarching message:

The core insight of the network perspective is that the pattern of relations among the elements of a system—be they people, organizations, neurons, or computer servers—has important consequences for the system's performance. 

We could not agree more and congratulate Steve on his new post.  We know the results from the varied list of  research topics  will improve our collective OQ.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

 

 

What a difference a decade makes. From Blogiversary to Telepresence

The piles of reading matter in my office are at critical mass so its clean up day. 

1. Happy Blogiversary

I've been saving the July 14-15 Wall Street Journal to read their "Happy Blogiversary" article that turns to twelve commentators including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, Christopher Cox, and Mia Farrow.  Unlikely selections, no?

I put the article aside as I associated the start of blogging with PyraLabs and Blogger that I now see is 1999. The Wall Street Journal admits:

"The dating of the 10th anniversary of blogs, and the ascription of primacy to the first blogger" ... an "imperfect exercise".

The article mentions Dave Winer, who blogged (and still does of course), with Scripting News, and "Cameron Barrett", Camworld, and the "polemical Mr. Barger in the advance guard".  The WSJ piece concludes:

"But by widespread consensus, 1997 is a reasonable point at which to mark the emergence of the blog as a distinct life-form."

Reading Tim O'Reilly's quote on Dave Winer's bio page indicates that 1997 is also time to celebrate the anniversary of RSS.

2.  Looking Ahead:  Telepresence

The Financial Times July 16 has a story looking at where Cisco's CEO John Chambers is placing his next online bet. Not surprisingly,

"Cisco's most recent bet is that future growth will come not just from network infrastructure, but from applications and services that help customers take better advantage of the connections between themselves and their customers.

To that end, it has launched a series of new technologies that combines, voice video and data traffic with other services such as voice mail, instant messaging and teleconferencing."

(We'd covered Cisco's multiple acquisitions including WebEx on this blog.)

As we look back to a decade of blogs, Chambers and Cisco are looking ahead and making  their bet on "Telepresence":

"a high end videoconferencing system that uses life-sied images and carefully synchronized audio to create the illusion that participants on a call are meeting face-to-face."

Bill Lessard had alerted us to the arrival of "Telepresence" earlier this year with  Telepresence World.

So if in fact Telepresence is already here, what's next? What we will be worthy of celebration in 2017?

~ Jenny Ambrozek

21st Century Organization Facebook Group: Please Join Us

Bill Ives has an interesting Facebook post that echoes my experience. I'm absolutely intrigued by the seamless ease of communicating and connecting via Facebook, but along with Bill Ives and Susan Anderson, based on our wall exchanges, I'm looking for the profile options that make Facebook more business minded.

Reflecting this blog's focus, it seemed time to create a Facebook 21st Century Organization Group to:

Explore solutions and proven practices for improving strategic thinking and day-to-day operating effectiveness of organizations in a complex world.

We trust you will join us and share. We're delighted that Jeffrey Keefer, Robin Yap and Howard Greenstein have already checked in.

As Victoria Axelrod and I as the 21st Century Organization Group are sponsoring the Student Sessions at the Organizational Development Network October Conference we especially look forward to connecting with conference attendees in advance through the new 21st Century Organization Facebook Group.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Using a Wiki to Co-Create an Article: Paying Attention to Uluru

Thanks Chris Carfi for sharing our lessons learned using a wiki to co-create an article on "learning through participation and connected intelligence" for Knowledge Tree, the Australian Flexible Learning Framework ejournal.  (My June 29 post provides context.)

Working with co-authors Victoria Axelrod and Kiki Mulliner on this article was a privilege and the lessons learned Chris Carfi points to from our article submission was just the beginning.  Rich conversations happened throughout with my co-authors and the group of people we approached for insights, and others who found us during the writing process. See the Acknowledgements page in the wiki. My sincere thanks to all.

Those distant from the oldest continent may be unfamiliar with Uluru the world's second largest monolith, and World Heritage site in the heart of Australia. I'm fortunate to have visited, and driven the 9.4km circumference at dusk, marvelling at the landscape that is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, the Aboriginal people of the area.

Photo Stuart Edwards 2006 Wikimedia Commons License

Uluru came to mind as we collaborated in the wiki and worked on the article.  Why? Because while Uluru impresses as it rises over a 1,000 feet above the desert plain, what's even more impressive is the unseen estimated two thirds lying below the ground.

I've participated in online email based Yahoo and Google groups and been conscious of the significant activity that happens behind the scenes in private exchanges.  I was paying close attention during our article writing collaboration because I realized our wiki "Recent Changes" made very transparent when we were, and were not active.

Being absent from the wiki was not a good indicator of whether or not work on the article was proceeding.  At times yes, it was, when we were travelling or engaged in other pursuits. But invisible through the wiki, especially as the deadline approached, was the flurry of email exchanges between the co-authors and the smart people in our networks we were tapping for insights, as well as phone calls, blog and Facebook activity. Not to forget the hours each co-author contributed to independent writing and editing to emerge the article.

We didn't track time devoted to each activity, or what part of our effort ultimately was most valuable for producing the article. However, if organizations are to increase proficiency in using collaborative tools like a wiki, based on our experience I seriously encourage paying close attention, gathering data to track the process, and allowing time to reflect on what worked and didn't.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Looking for the Buzz around "Mobilizing Minds"

Thanks to Emilie Filou at World Business magazine I had the opportunity to review the latest McKinsey book Mobilizing Minds. 

I was reminded of the book seeing the overview article by Mobilizing Minds authors Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce in the latest McKinsey Quarterly.  I'd also revisited the book in the process of co-authoring an article on "Learning through Participation and Connected Intelligence" for Knowledge Tree the Australian Journal of Learning Innovation.

It's interesting looking at Mobilizing Minds in the context of Wikinomics and Wealth of Networks to help understand the evolution in understanding creating value through networks. Mobilizing Minds is important for focusing attention to the organizational structures essential to creating strategic advantage from the computing networking technologies that have transformed the way work gets done.

It occurred to me in reviewing Mobilizing Minds that:

"The real value and potential of the book..will be released by mobilising minds around it, extending the network and perspectives on the issues raised and filling the gaps identified by the authors."

Today I see just 5 blog mentions of the book in Technorati and as yet no customer written reviews on Amazon.

So here's my contribution to promoting discussion around Mobilizing Minds. Do you see, as the Amazon summary states, that "organizational design and redesign" is:

"the new model for survival in the modern, digital, global economy. With the right design, your organization will have the capabilities to pursue whatever strategy is necessary to compete on any scale, react to any market change, leverage any opportunity, and sail past the competition."

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Catalyst

I have always found the word catalyst unique in its ability to communicate so much dynamic energy which is probably because it conjures up my high school chem lab, even the smells and sounds, of what catalyzing agents can do. They are unique as they participate in reactions but are neither reactants nor products of the reaction they catalyze.

Understanding the "economic catalyst" as a  business process is illustratively detailed by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee in their new book Catalyst Code.

If you want to hear David interviewed, a podcast is available on The Invisible Hand Podcast

What I took away was the concept of the powerful interplay of what they call the "two-sided" business, especially when they start up.  Although some of their examples pre date the web - Dinner's Club for instance, most are enabled by the very nature of today's web - interactivity.  The web-based businesses are no surprise, Google and eBay, who figured out the participation of the interaction ahead of time. The "two sided" interplay is still not yet grasped by traditional businesses or remarkably even web-based startups.

The Economic catalyst is:

An entity that has a) two or more groups of customers; b) who need each other in some way; but c) can't capture the value from their mutual attraction on their own; and d) rely on the catalyst to facilitate value-creating reactions between them. For-profit businesses, joint ventures, cooperatives, standard-setting bodies, and governments operate  catalysts.

Catalytic reaction: In the economy, the process by which value is created by facilitating the interaction between two or more mutually interdependent groups of customers.

Market Design work and a course by Al Roth and Peter Coles at Harvard who both research and teach experimental economics, a sister of behavioral economics, seems to fit well with the idea of "economic catalyst".

Here is a list of the top ten (no priority) of 26 ideas which they have culled from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.  All articles describing these Market Design businesses are at link.

1. Matching borrowers and lenders without banks
2. Ticket price Futures
3. Recruiting college athletes (matching athletes to colleges)
4. Online recruiting
5. UK Medical Matching (without preferences)
6. The "Upfront"  (futures) market for  television advertising
7. Internet real estate sales (without realtors)
8. Post season college football bowls
9. Market for votes (at Harvard)
10. Economics of virtual worlds

Both of Catalyst Code and Market Design help make the economic case for participation and the mutual relationship required of business to be value creating successes.

~ Victoria G. Axelrod

07.07.07 - Live Earth

The critics are out in force on Al Gore's global Live Earth fest but I think they are missing the point - mobilizing young minds (and a few million more senior) to take a small step toward addressing the earth's climate crisis.

It's not about the music, it's not about the event, its about connecting so many people both physically and online in a monster network to participate and influence and issue.

I am old enough to have participated in the first Earth Day and still have my button!  Having grown up around east coast rivers that were polluted beyond recognition from industrial waste I thought this was the norm and that I would never see them as habitable for wildlife or humans.  But we know the end of that story - we did pull together in the US and saved our waterways and more.

Thumbs up to AL and company for using a multimedia platform to effect grassroots changes to consumer behavior and prod corporations, political leaders to step up to sustainability.  I fully expect to see positive results.  Live Earth sure beats Dead Earth.

~Victoria G. Axelrod

Fresh Perspectives: New Network Theory Conference

Via Valdis Krebs blog (whom I believe was present) a pointer to the blog reports from the New Network Theory Conference sessions at the University of Amsterdam.

Recommended browsing for topics ranging from cultural variables in networks through multiple interesting angles of "New Network Theory" including addressing network dynamics, study of knitting communities, and "foam theory" promoted by Mirko Tobias Schaefer's. It calls for new methods to map social relations on the internet.

"He states that there are different layers of interaction, no strict borders between communities, pseudo-communities and massive user interaction. They are permeable. Schaefer sees the web as a sociotechnological ecosystem which best approach is to consider it like foam (Sloterdijk, 2004); beer or shampoo, whatever you like most. Because of its multi chamber systems whose cells are seperated by thin cells which are highly permeable, this would be the best metaphor for the Internet network."

Given our experiment in process using a wiki to co-create an article on "Learning through Participation and Connected Intelligence" the report of Katy Borner's presentation on Global Brain Pressures: Towards Scholarly Marketplaces is a find. It discusses co-authorship networks, calls for a marketplace model to maximize the global brain, and to help transform the way science is done with:

“an open source, community-driven framework/application for the integration and utilization of datasets, algorithms, tools, and computing resources.”

Read on to learn from network studies regarding bird flu, health information, life cycles and  "Linking and the network imaginary”.  And if that's not enough there's the social life of (technologically-enhanced) pets and their owners:

"Noshir begins with a story of the social life of (technologically-enhanced) pets. Your smart-tagged dog can meet other dogs and exchange information. When your dog returns home, that information can be downloaded, you can learn about your dogs’ friends, the owners of those dogs, set up dog dates and so on. What is new today, for us even more than for pets, is the extent to which we use technology to find new social networks rather than cementing existing ones. And this creates the need for a multi-theoretical, multi-level approach to understanding social behavior."

From a distance the New Network Theory conference appears a veritable brain workout.

~  Jenny Ambrozek