Notable roles in living systems

Measuring and mapping networks can help us understand a system holistically.

With that in mind, I paused a week ago to read an obituary in the NY Times: "Lawrence B. Slobodkin, Pioneering Ecologist, Dies at 81." Curious to see what had made Slobodkin a pioneer in his own systems-oriented field, I read on and discovered his most famous paper. Published in 1960 as "Community Structure, Population Control and Competition," the paper's four pages contain a grand overview of how terrestrial ecosystems work, and is still widely discussed today.

Slobodkin and his co-authors present these distinct roles in the terrestrial ecosystem:

• fossil fuels
• sunlight
• producers (e.g., plants)
  
• decomposers
  
• herbivores
• carnivores

They then tackle the overarching question: for each role above, what is the critical factor that limits its growth? For example, in which roles are peers competing for scarce resources, and in which roles are populations controlled not by scarce resources but by predation?

Somehow, I am convinced that these roles map in a meaningful way more recent natural systems such as the world economy or American healthcare. Which parts of these systems correspond to which of the above roles in the terrestrial biosphere? Any ideas, anyone?

One thing that surprised me about Slobodkin's map of the biosphere was its early and explicit inclusion of fossil fuels. This inclusion makes a lot more sense to me now that I am reading (coincidentally) Michael Pollan's Ominivore's Dilemma, which also speaks to a holistic view of the terrestrial biosphere. One of the darker themes of the book is that human desire for productivity leads people to feed plants with fossil fuels instead of sunlight.

The same day Slobodkin's obituary was published, the NY Times also featured this headline: "Emphasis on growth is called misguided," reporting a paper commissioned by Nicolas Sarkozy and written by a pair of Nobel-laureate economists.

It's a lot to absorb. But strikes me as relevant to those of us interested in metrics that pertain to well-being.

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Interesting Webinar 9/14: Leadership for a New Era

The wonderful Claire Reinelt recently shared this with me:

Leadership for a New Era

We invite ALL members of the leadership development community to join a free introductory webinar to the Leadership for a New Era (LNE) initiative on September 14th at 12:30 EDT (9:30 PDT). LNE is a collaborative learning initiative developed by the Leadership Learning Community (LLC), a nonprofit organization focused on connecting organizations and individuals in the leadership development field with a commitment to social equity. Through LNE we are establishing partnerships (such as these) to influence our current leadership development thinking and practice, and to promote a shift from a model of leadership focused on individual skills and attributes to a model of leadership that is inclusive, rooted in community, networked, and action-oriented. For additional information please visit the LNE website: http://leadershipforanewera.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Influence and social capital of 21st century leaders

My previous post summarized "four fundamentals of networks" with special emphasis on the context of leadership. Today I'll take a closer look at the foundation of the four fundamentals: personal influence. This foundation is highlighted in the bottom two quadrants below, which share a network focus on influential positions and roles:
These two quadrants provide a good foundation for at least a couple reasons:

First, most of us naturally equate leadership with positions of personal influence. In their excellent article "Social Capital of Twenty-First Century Leaders," Dan Brass and David Krackhardt begin by saying, "Accomplishing work through others has always been the essence of leadership"; later in the chapter they simplify this to "Influence is the essence of leadership." As I summarized in this post, Brass and Krackhardt then describe how aspiring leaders can use social networks to gain as much influence as quickly as possible. (Their article really is outstanding, FYI.)

Second, centrality and structural holes--the network concepts underlying the highlighted two quadrants--are the two most intuitive notions of network structure. If you find "structural holes" less intuitive than "centrality," then just substitute "clustering" in place of "structural holes." Clustering refers to groups, structural holes to the gaps between groups: Just like foreground and background, they define each other in complementary partnership.

The topic of personal influence in social networks gets lots of attention. For example, this announcement crossed my desk last week: "'Influence is the future of media'. Influence is the hottest topic in marketing, advertising, media and social media today. Find out how to tap the power of influence." It's not too late to sign up for http://www.futureofinfluencesummit.com/.

Another view of influence and social networks crossed my desk a month ago: Duncan Watts, Columbia sociologist and principal research scientist for Yahoo, told Fast Company magazine his opinion of the idea that a subgroup of "influentials" is largely responsible for trend-setting: "It sort of sounds cool, but it's wonderfully persuasive only for as long as you don't think about it." Later in the article, Watts concludes: "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can."

Are these views of influence hopelessly at odds? Perhaps not. As I explore that, I'll move to the top half of the four fundamentals of networks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Four fundamentals of networks

Claire Reinelt and I just contributed a chapter, "Social Networks," to appear in Political and Civic Leadership, edited by Richard Couto and produced by Sage Publications.

Political and Civic Leadership provides a comprehensive undergraduate-level overview of the field of leadership and includes 100 chapters in two volumes. We are happy to be included in an all-star cast of contributors (academics and practitioners of leadership); and we are also happy to be done!

Richard has structured the book as a reference, with each chapter standing on its own, so that readers can flip to a topic of interest (e.g., "decisions," "ethics," "globalization," "philanthropy") without having to read the preceding 500 pages. Nevertheless, there is an overarching structure to the 100 chapters that is not alphabetical. They are divided into these 11 thematic sections:

1. Introduction To Politics And Civic Leadership
2. Philosophy And Theories Of Political And Civic Leadership
3. Purposes Of Political And Civic Leadership
4. The Failure Of Politics
5. The Processes Of Political And Civic Leadership
6. The Institutions Of Political And Civic Leadership
7. The Contexts Of Public Leadership
8. The Psychology Of Public Leadership
9. The Tasks And Tools Of Political And Civic Leadership
10. The Competencies Of Public Leadership
11. Depictions Of Public Leadership

Our chapter will appear in Section 9: "The Tasks and Tools of Political and Civic Leadership."

The writing process helped us to deepen the foundations of our framework of four kinds of leadership networks. We considered three different perspectives, each of which describes a different set of four fundamentals of networks:

Kilduff and Tsai describe four orienting concepts of network thinking:

• Embeddedness: How are organizations and behavior influenced by social relations?
  
• Social Capital: What is the value of a person's connections to others?
  
• Centrality: What is the influence of a person according to his position?
  
• Structural Holes: Where are there gaps between distinct social groups?
  

Borgatti and Foster describe four primary aspects of the network paradigm, based on the following two questions: First, Do we care more about improving performance internally, or expanding impact externally? Second, Do we care more about the structural position of individuals, or the flow of communication? These priorities give us four categories:

• Social access to resources: Focused on communication flow and internal performance
  
• Structural capital: Focused on network position and internal performance
  
• Environmental shaping: Focused on network position and external impact
  
• Contagion: Focused on communication flow and external impact
  

In our work, we have encountered four main types of leadership networks:

• Peer leadership networks: Focused on building trust among leaders
  
• Organizational leadership networks: Focused on leveraging network position
  
• Field-policy leadership networks: Focused on shaping the environment
  
• Collective leadership networks: Focused on unleashing innovation
  

Each of the above "four fundamentals of networks" is a list that stands on its own. In the process of writing our chapter for Sage, we synthesized them all into this chart:


What does all that mean? Mostly these two things: (1) more blogging from me soon, with case studies from each of the quadrants above, and (2) pondering why the above four quadrants do not correspond to my beloved "holy trinity of network power," nor to the esteemed standard text SNA: Methods and Applications by Wasserman and Faust.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

New Yorker vs Wired: Is Free the Future?

This week's New Yorker has a fun piece by Malcolm Gladwell, "Priced to Sell: Is Free the Future?" in which he takes on Chris Anderson's new book: Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and is famous for coining the phrase "Long Tail." He blogs at http://thelongtail.com and most recently posted, "Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened?"

I rather enjoy it when the New Yorker takes a smack at Wired. Back in 2006, John Cassidy wrote a NYer article "Going Long: In the new “long tail” marketplace, has the blockbuster met its match?" in which he critiqued The Long Tail (i.e., the book by Chris Anderson).

That article by John Cassidy remains my all-time favorite description of Webonomics (especially in terms of learning a lot by reading a little). I highly recommend Cassidy's and Gladwell's articles as a matched set.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Tweet of submission: @behoppe

Claire Reinelt has won me over. My first tweet is this quote from Frederick Douglass:

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Following the world's greatest RSS feed

Thank you Paul Toms for sharing your Twitter experiences and other reminisces in response to my last post. I like the Will Leitch article ("Why Twitter is more fun the less you use it") and your quote from it: "Twitter is the world's greatest RSS feed."

Like Paul and Will, I am a fan of RSS. (For those unfamiliar with RSS, it is New Media's version of the AP News Wire; see "RSS in plain English" by Common Craft.)

Much like Will, I find RSS (e.g., Twitter) to be more fun the less I use it. But my idea of "using" is different than Will's. I consider reading to be "using" whereas Will considers reading to be "not using."

A couple examples of how I use and follow RSS feeds without reading:

• Over the years I have subscribed to hundreds of blogs and other RSS feeds using NewsGator. Rather than read them, I simply let NewsGator dump them into my Outlook mailbox. Once the content is in my mailbox, my cheap mongo-hard-drive and my free desktop search software (Copernic) keep all that content ready for me. For example, now that I am curious to read about Twitter, I can search my hard drive for "Twitter" and see that Nova Spivak blogged a few months ago that "In the world of Twitter things happen in real-time, not Internet-time. It's even faster than the world of the 1990's and the early 2000's." He goes on to chronicle the acceleration of our lives, concluding: "Twitter is simply faster.... Twitter may overcome the asynchronous nature of the Web. Even search may go 'real-time.'" Having waited 4 months for the moment when I actually care to read Nova's post, I will wait a while longer before I respond to his hope that Twitter will help us "overcome the asynchronous nature of the Web" and make "search go 'real-time'"--two statements that beg for rebuttal.
  
• Another one of my favorite uses of RSS is the right sidebar of the Leadership Networks site, "Recently Noted Links." The links in this sidebar come from an RSS feed that provides Leadership Networks with a non-stop news-ticker of content that is relevant and useful to the audience of the site. Furthermore, this one RSS feed represents the synthesis of hundreds of RSS feeds. You can glimpse under the hood here. It's similar to the previous example, except that the content scrolls down the Leadership Networks sidebar instead of getting archived to my hard drive. I guess the content of that sidebar is my version of what Nova Spivak calls "real-time search." Because I see it that way, the content is presented to embody (not to overcome) the asynchronous nature of the Web: It's available but not interrupting, there when you want it.
  

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.