Networks of negative relationships

Social networks bring to mind collaboration for many of us; however, the word "network" is equally appropriate to describe interconnected negative relationships. Yesterday's NY Times featured an amazing picture of the Middle East where the links run the gamut from "rivals" to "deep hatred" to "sworn enemies" to "war":
As I mentioned in a post on jerks and fools at the office, negative relationships often influence the big picture more than their positive counterparts, and the study of negative-valued social networks is still underappreciated. Professor Joe Labianca is one of the researchers working hardest at "balancing the ledger" to understand social networks that include negative as well as positive relationships.

Asking someone to name his sworn enemies amongst his co-workers might be impractical. But in "no holds barred" arenas (love, war, etc.) mapping negative relationships is sometimes feasible and almost always more revealing than mapping positive relationships. Just take a look at these network maps of political scandal previously published by the NY Times to see how lame positive-valued network maps can be in comparison to the Middle East map of hatred, above.

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Floyd Landis is God

Today American Floyd Landis gave the world one of the greatest individual cycling performances of all time. [Update: perhaps the most infamous ride of all time. Sigh.]

Landis, among the initial favorites to win the Tour de France, seemingly fell from contention yesterday when he "bonked" and lost over ten minutes to his rivals. But today Landis more than rebounded. Singlehandedly, he rode away from everyone and took back all that time (all but 31 seconds). With one time trial stage remaining, Landis must now be considered the Tour de France favorite once again.

Such over-the-top displays of individual athleticism are rare in the Tour de France, where winners typically succeed only thanks to behind-the-scenes sacrifice by their teammates. During last year's Tour de France, I said of cycling that "few Americans appreciate the team dynamics and strategy that are the heart of what road racing is about." It's a sport sophisticated enough to inspire 21st century innovations in the mathematics of game theory.

Nothing was remotely subtle, sophisticated, or behind-the-scenes about Landis's strategy today.

BTW, did I mention that Landis has a degenerative hip disorder and is due for joint replacement as soon as the Tour is over? (Reported last week by NY Times Magazine.)

Go Floyd!

[Update 2: Can anyone confirm the rumor that Blogger.com is going to start testing "Blog of the Day" winners for unnaturally high levels of caffeine?]

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Are you networked for successful innovation?

MIT Sloan Management Review recently published "Are you networked for successful innovation?" by Professor Polly Rizova of Boston University.

Based on in-depth study of six projects in the R&D lab of a Fortune 500 corporation, Rizova summarizes four key factors behind successful innovation:

1. Strong corporate support
2. Open communication without formal reporting
3. A "technical star" who is central in the technical-advice network
4. A “managerial star” who is central in the organizational-advice network

Interestingly, Rizova also looked at information-sharing networks and friendship networks, and found these much less relevant than the factors listed above.

Rizova acknowledges that these four factors alone are not enough--they must reinforce each other in order to work. She goes on to discuss the complementary values of the technical-advice and organizational-advice networks, and how people's actual roles in these networks can help inform their explictly prescribed roles in the organization.

This article is a must-read for leaders of R&D units.

It's also a great SNA case study for those wondering exactly which social networks are relevant to their organizational goals. This is one of the hottest questions going in the ONA community of practice (which spawned from the SNA Jump Start conference). For a good follow-up case study, see also David Krackhardt's HBR classic about technical-advice and trust networks.

Thanks to Francesca Grippa for alerting me to this article.

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Network healing and adaptability

Yesterday the Italians won the World Cup, but the bigger story is the exuberant return of German patriotism.

I am not old enough to remember the Third Reich or the rise of the Iron Curtain, but I was just graduating from college when the Berlin wall came down. What a happy day that was. Today seems like an even happier day for the Germans -- while the rest of us get to be happy for them. Congratulations!

Germany's recovery comes well-timed to keep my spirits up when a community dear to my heart has just taken a bit of a beating.

Several years ago, after a long period of searching and reflection, I joined a Unitarian Universalist church. My growth from cross-armed skeptic to active community member is one of the great healing gifts of my life, a gift I received thanks to three people in particular -- Thomas Mikelson, Chris Bell, and Rita Butterfield.

In the past month, I have bid farewell to all three of these champion network weavers. Thomas retired in June after 17 years of leading our church. That same weekend, our congregation ordained Chris -- one of our long-time members, and a recent divinity school graduate. Now Chris is taking his immense talents and his wife Rita to Santa Rosa, CA, where he will lead his own church. Yesterday I saw Chris and Rita for the last time.

Farewell, Thomas, Chris and Rita! We will not be the same without you.

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User driven innovation and Karim Lakhani

Recently I poo-pooed the "dawn of emergent collaboration" (a phenomenon older than civilization) and said I was much more excited about the resurgence of "user-driven technical invention."

Today I discovered the UserInnovation web community led by Karim Lakhani, who recently graduated from MIT and joined the Harvard Business School faculty. The welcome page of UserInnovation states:

"Empirical research is finding that users rather than manufacturers are the actual developers of many or most new products and services – and that they are a major locus of innovative activity in the economy. This finding opens up new questions and avenues for exploration in fields ranging from economics to management of technology to organizational behaviour to marketing research. Examples are patterns in innovation by users, characteristics of innovating users, design of a user-centered innovation process, economics of a distributed innovation process that includes users as innovators, and social welfare implications of innovations by users.

"We have set up this website to provide a convenient repository for papers on topics related to innovation by users. Our goal is to establish a community in which research information related to the topic of user innovation can be freely exchanged."

Thanks to Bob Wolf for introducing me to the work of Karim Lakhani.

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Jeffersonian democracy and net neutrality

Yesterday's celebratory quote of Thomas Jefferson received a thoughtful reply from Suresh V, reminding us that the author of The Declaration of Independence was a lifelong slave-owner.

Suresh is much more polite in his criticism than Jefferson's contemporaries were. Foremost among the Jefferson-bashers of history is Alexander Hamilton. Though not as celebrated as Jefferson, Hamilton arguably had even more influence in shaping the modern United States of America. You might say that Jefferson planted the seed of the American Revolution and Hamilton tended the resulting garden.

Hamilton saw Jefferson's vision of populist democracy as misguided and dangerously self-serving. When Jefferson publicly called Hamilton a corrupt monarchist (for such atrocities as creating the US Federal Bank and Customs Service), Hamilton pointed out that Jefferson's tactics were far more likely to bring down the new republic, as quoted by Ron Chernow's excellent biography Alexander Hamilton:

"If [I] had wanted to impose a monarchy upon America, [I] would follow the classic path of a populist demagogue: I would mount the hobbyhorse of popularity, I would cry out usurpation, danger to liberty etc. etc. I would endeavour to prostrate the federal government, raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm."

This vicious debate between Jefferson and Hamilton reminds me of today's debate over net neutrality. In one corner, we have the paragons of online populist democracy, led by Google. In the other corner, the titans of industrial Internet infrastructure, such as Comcast.

In contrast to some of my blogger friends who support net neutrality (e.g., Bill Ives, Mal Watlington), I am glad that the government has so far refused to prohibit Comcast and other telcoms from instituting preferential pricing schemes for access to their Internet networks. With lobbyists from Google now crying "antitrust", I think we have reason to suspect that net neutrality--as it is argued in Washington, anyway--is as much about protecting the Google-Amazon-eBay oligopoly of social commerce (as reported in "Going Long" by John Cassidy in today's New Yorker) as it is about protecting individual life, liberty, and pursuit of online happiness.

Which mega-corporation are you cheering for?

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Independence Day

Today Americans celebrate Independence Day. Before getting to the part about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Thomas Jefferson began the Declaration of Independence with history's most eloquent statement of disconnecting:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

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