Adapt or die: what businesses can learn from science and nature

I just got this invitation to an entrepreneurial networking dinner featuring the talk, "Adapt or die: what businesses can learn from science and nature."

"Adapt or die" made me uneasy, especially when presented as a lesson to be learned "from science and nature," and so I mulled it over long enough to come up with three different reasons to edit the title to "Die and adapt."

1. Nature: Generally speaking, adaptation occurs in a population of organisms, and death occurs in individual organisms. The science of evolution and natural selection is largely about the essential connection between these two phenomena: the death of organisms is a key driving force in the adaptation of populations. Hence, "Die and adapt."
   
2. Science A: Those intellectual smarty-pants in white lab coats are more often wrong than not, and the most common way the wrong ideas get weeded out is when the scientists who believe in them finally die. Then the younger smarty-pants who have slightly better ideas can finally publish, get tenure, and squash the even newer, smarter, generation of upstarts. This scientific soap-opera makes for a tragically hilarious read in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." Hence, "Die and adapt."
   
3. Science B: As John Ziman says, "The author [of scientific literature] presents an entirely false picture of his actual procedure of discovery. All the false starts, the mistakes, the unnecessary complications, are hidden; and a yarn, of preternatural prescience, precision and profit, is spun." Keith Sawyer explains the same truth in Group Genius: "Fail early, fail often, fail gloriously." Now just substitute "die" for "fail" to see why we must "Die and adapt."
4. Bonus reason from the world of organizational theory: "When losing is learning"
   

"Adapt or die"--sounds so true, but perhaps it is counterproductive to posit "adapt" and "die" as two alternatives between which we must choose.

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http://webmathematics.net

One more week before classes start. In preparation, I am improving my online Introduction to Network Mathematics, which you will now find at http://webmathematics.net. Along the way I am learning how to be dangerous with Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, a massively juicy collection of software that I have acquired as a concession to my students, who generally consider set theory and eigenvectors to be dry.

With the URL "http://webmathematics.net," I am tipping my cap to Tim Berners-Lee and gang over at http://webscience.org. Their work can be summed up by the picture at right.

I plan to integrate their "Framework for Web Science" with my own course as much as I can. The fact that they are writing for fellow PhDs and I am teaching non-technical college freshman makes this integration non-trivial, to say the least.

Whenever I get discouraged by the gap I am trying to bridge with this integration, I find encouragement in the words of my new patron saint, John Ziman. The same John Ziman who wrote that "publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of science" also said:

"In my view the gravest weakness in the organization of modern science is the lack of systematic exposition of the consensus at the stage between [scholarly] review article and the undergraduate textbook."

You can find the above quote in Ziman's 1968 monograph, Public Knowledge ("An Essay Concerning the Social Dimension of Science"), specifically in the chapter "Community and Communications."

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"Information, Communication, Knowledge" by John Ziman

I just finished reading Group Genius by Keith Sawyer, and can't thank Robert Rasmussen of Lego Serious Play enough for recommending this book to me.

My favorite part of Group Genius is the gushing review on the back cover by management guru Ori Brafman (of Starfish and Spider network fame). Brafman says, "Sawyer has completely changed how I think about creativity."

That kind of review buys into the "big light bulb effect" that Sawyer devotes his entire book to dismantling. Instead of big ideas and big light bulbs, Sawyer explains that creativity in fact happens through slow, small, and collaborative steps.

Sawyer's enormous collection of endnotes does a great job of reinforcing his well-spun anecdotes with scholarly empirical research. Even so, I think he understates the degree to which his own book is but a well-packaged echo of work done long before.

Lewis Thomas, in his essay "On societies as organisms" (published in his best-selling 1974 book The Lives of a Cell) quotes John Ziman thus:

"The invention of a mechanism for the systematic publication of fragments of scientific work may well have been the key event in the history of modern science.... A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw--not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than one individual can exert."

John Ziman wrote those words in his essay, "Information, Communication, Knowledge," published by Nature in 1969. My favorite part of the essay is the paragraph immediately preceding the part quoted by Thomas:

"Our present system of scientific communication depends almost entirely on [literature with] three basic characteristics: it is fragmentary, derivative, and edited. These characteristics are, however, quite essential."

So, while some people may experience revelation upon reading Group Genius (like Ori Brafman), I instead find Sawyer's book to be fragmentary, derivative and edited. But those are exactly the traits that make Sawyer's book so creative and so worth reading.

BTW, check out Ziman's bibliography and see how he relies on material published in 1939.

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Social networks and organizations: Understanding the research

My book report on Social Networks and Organizations, by Kilduff and Tsai. Part Two of a Series.

Chapter Two: Understanding Social Network Research. Kilduff and Tsai discuss the scientific ancestry of SNA and highlight the major distinctive concepts of the field. They state their case thus:

"At its best, network research has several distinctive features that differentiate it from traditional approaches in the social sciences:

1. Network research focuses on relations and the patterns of relations rather than on attributes of actors;
2. Network research is amenable to multiple levels of analysis, and can thus provide micro-macro linkages;
3. Network research can integrate quantitative, qualitative, and graphical data, allowing more thorough and in-depth analysis.

None of these features is well established in traditional approaches in the social sciences."

The authors present Exhibit A: Bruce Kapferer's analysis of strategy and transaction in an African factory. Their use of this case study is notable for a few reasons:

• It was published in 1972 and so defuses the trendy stigma of ONA
• Kapferer's study begins with a preface by his mentor J. Clyde Mitchell, who says, "Kapferer himself has argued cogently that social networks do not by themselves constitute a 'theory'. ... He must go beyond these data for an adequate explanation of the events he is considering." This defuses the network zealotry mention by Kilduff and Tsai in their own book's introduction, and sets up their next chapter: "Is there social network theory?"
• The actual story observed by Kapferer involves the emergence of organized labor in one particular African factory. As the story opens, the workers are too decentralized to influence management. By the end, the workforce is much more centralized and successfully organizes a strike against the factory owners. I can almost hear Kilduff and Tsai snickering at the thought of management consultants trying to use this case study to sell SNA to some CEO. Everything about the story is backwards from the way we commonly preach networks and collaboration today.
• The analysis by Kapferer is both strikingly thorough and strikingly ignorant of related research that is easy to see with hindsight. I guess scientists are only human after all.

At the end of this chapter, Kilduff and Tsai recommend further reading, including:

Nohria, N. and Eccles, R.G. (eds). 1992. Networks and organizations: Structure, form and action. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. A broad cross-sectional collection of SNA work.

Scott, J. 2000. Social network analysis: A handbook. 2nd edn. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. The best SNA handbook available.

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Master of the universe

Doing nothing has given me time to re-read Chapter 2 of Social Networks and Organizations, which I will discuss in a blog post soon. The chapter draws heavily on one particular case study, Strategy and transaction in an African factory, by Bruce Kapferer. This is no ordinary case study, but in fact a 366-page book published in 1972.

Doing nothing has given me so much time that I tracked this book down. The effort was definitely worth it--it was my first time checking out a book with my BU faculty ID. I get to keep the book for five months. I used to think three weeks with the option to renew was powerful. Now I am master of the library universe. I may not read Kapferer for four months or so, just to enjoy thinking about the poor students who are waiting to get their hands on his book.

Those of you with less than omnipotent library powers can take some solace in the knowledge that there is not one picture or map in Kapferer's entire 366 pages of exemplary network analysis. Instead, he presents the African factory network in matrix form, like so:
And, there are only two such networks presented in the whole book: one "before" and one "after." Click on the image above to see more detail and re-live 1970s typesetting.

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Doing nothing

I am on a mini-hiatus, defined most notably by ignoring my email.

Reading Tao Te Ching provides lots of moral support for doing nothing. The world will survive a few days of my not fixing its problems.

Not everyone likes this philosophy. Here in Massachusetts, a new law that mandates health insurance for all residents has been widely publicized on TV with the catch-phrase: "Ignoring a problem never made one go away."

Those seeking a counter-argument to this credo should read Lewis Thomas (Dean of Yale Medical School, etc., etc.) who in Lives of a Cell wrote an essay "Your Very Good Health," which he summed up near the end by saying, "The great secret... is that most things [i.e., health problems] get better by themselves."

Digging up Thomas' classic collection of essays has given me lots of other food for thought that I can share later, when I am back to doing something.

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