Endless Knots

Bear killed in my neighborhood!

I live the village of West Newton, in a city of 85,000, eight miles from Boston. The Massachusetts Turnpike runs through it. As do trains, cars, bikes, and a whole lot of people. Yet on Sunday, a 120-pound bear was found in a tree about a quarter of a mile from my house.

Adding to the wildlife roster: deer, coyotoes, fox, howler cats... what's next?

I'm also sad to learn that the bear was killed rather than sedated and saved. And the outcry has begun. Surely the Newton's police could have come up with a stun gun when the Department of Environmental Protection's police tranq gun jammed (the official story). After all, the Newton Police Department is literally across the street from where the bear was found.

Newton's first bear, but certainly not the last.

 

 

 

Have any other authors received this email?

I just received this survey request but can't figure out who "Publishing Research Group" is. The survey is benign but it appears they're f(ph)ishing for authors. Author friends: have any of you gotten this?

Hello,

We are inviting you to take one of our series of surveys concerning the book publishing industry (see the 'Enter Survey Here' button below). The survey requires 4-5 minutes of your time. All those (and only those) that complete the survey will receive a complete statistical reporting of the results of the survey (typically about 2 weeks after we distribute the invitations to take the survey).

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Decide to Network by Robert Muller

Every now and then, we get a request for copies of the "Decide to Network" postcard, backstory here. One such came yesterday, prompting me, post-Boston Marathon, to remember the power of this message. As noted before, when Robert Muller sent us this poem in 1981, there were 4 billion people in the world; 32 years later, we're 7 billion. There's a great deal more to say about Boston, the kind of post that takes a few hours, not a few minutes, like this one.

 

The virtual winner: The first Pulitzer to a distributed news organization

In a way, all news organizations are distributed, i.e. you can't really get most breaking news stories without showing up. But newsrooms have been the energy drinks for reporters for forever. As previously reported, I started my reporting career at the Pottstown Mercury in a rectange of six steel desks, three facing three. And keys to the newspaper car in order to go on assignment.

But until this year's Pulitzers were awarded, a truly virtual news operation had never received one. Here's a great story from NY Times reporter Brian Stelter on InsideClimateNews's virtual operations. They received the award for national reporting with their journalists in Washington, Boston (dear beloved city), and New York. Here's their "about" and the description of their wild celebration (plus a couple of other lines0 from Stelter's Times story:

'We’re a virtual organization,” said the publisher of the six-year-old Web site, David Sassoon, from his office in New York. So the celebration took place in a telephone conference call; whatever Champagne flowed, flowed in separate locations.

InsideClimate News may be the leanest news start-up ever to be presented with a Pulitzer, journalism’s highest honor, a prize that is typically awarded to regional and national newspapers. It beat out 50 other entrants and two finalists, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, for the prize.

With a full-time staff of just seven and a nonprofit business model, InsideClimate News exemplifies a new breed of news organization that depends on donations, both from rich charitable foundations and a handful of ordinary readers.

 

 

Roland Merullo: Importing common sense from Cuba

Roland, author of so many books including his recent Lunch with Buddha (as well as a novel about Cuba completely unrelated to this story, Fidel's Last Days), traveled "90 Miles From Home" (see Warren Miller's 1961 book by that title) recently on assignment for a golf magazine, picked up a few souvenirs (total value = $75), and had them confiscated at his port of re-entry, Burlington, VT. Irony aside that the only state with a "self-described democratic socialist" as senator should be the customs gate that enforces our antiquated embargo of Cuban imports, Roland, as usual, reflects thoughtfully on why it's time to change our policies in "A new path to Cuba: It’s time the US admitted the embargo doesn’t work." Note also that instead of doing what countless other visitors to Cuba likely do -- pretend that they were in Mexico or Canada, allowing custom officials to look the other way -- Roland went for the true story, which ultimately makes for a better one.

Here's the opening to whet your clicking:

On my way home from Cuba the other day — Havana via Montreal — I had all my souvenirs confiscated at the US-Canada border. I’d spent a week in Castro country and had loaded up on about $75 worth of T-shirts and small gifts. Instead of lying to the customs officials and saying I’d been in Montreal visiting friends, which would have been easy enough, I decided to tell them the real story: I’d gone to Cuba on an assignment for a golf magazine. Good-bye, T-shirts.

I’m not really blaming the rules-bound customs guys at the border checkpoint north of Burlington, Vt. US law says that any goods purchased in Cuba — with the strange exception of literature — must be confiscated. “You should have checked the State Department website,’’ one of them told me, and he was correct. But setting my own travel sloppiness aside, the law that says you can’t bring home a small bag of gifts from Cuba is absurd. If I remember right, we lost 58,000 good Americans in Vietnam, and 40 years later you can bring home just about anything from that nation. China, Russia, Albania, Burma, the dictatorships of Africa — please, spend some money there, bring home souvenirs for your kids.

But don’t spend a peso in Cuba...

PS: This makes me want to create a new category: Common Sense, but alas I fear it would lack for entries.

 

Sylvia Nasar's statement about her suit against Columbia

Photo by Dario Cantatore/Getty Images from NY Times, March 19, 2013

Earlier this week, Sylvia Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind and a tenured professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, filed suit against Columbia "accusing the university of misdirecting $4.5 million in funds over the last decade," according to Christine Haughney's article in the NY Times.

The suit arises from Nasar's appointment in 2000 as the John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism at Columbia and claims, among other charges, that while Knight provided $1.5m for endowing the chair she holds, the university failed to provide matching funds required by the grant. According to the complaint, Columbia instead paid her salary out of the Knight funds and failed to meet a number of other stipulations of the agreement, including supporting research, which, the suit says, she had to pay for out of pocket.

It's a bold move and a difficult thing to do, i.e. a lone professor is bringing a suit against one of the biggest, best endowed, and most powerful universities in the world. Sylvia, who's been a close friend since we met on our first day as students at Antioch College, has issued a statement, which I'm posting here with her approval:

Statement by Sylvia Nasar re: 

Nasar v. Trustees of Columbia University

 

Filing a lawsuit against Columbia, and having concerns about a key source of funding -- the Knight endowment -- become public, is not a course of action one chooses. But after more than two and a half years of attempts to engage university officials to discuss, and remedy, the issues described in the complaint, Columbia’s refusal to respond has, regrettably, led to this painful step. 

What’s at stake here: a great university must be able to assure donors that it will honor its promises. The default mode of a great journalism school must be one of transparency.

I love Columbia and intend to remain the Knight professor of business journalism until I retire.

The Knight Chair is a unique opportunity to make a difference in the way economics and financial reporters are trained in the digital age.  

In creating the Chair, Columbia’s, and Knight’s, original intentions were the best. And, partly, they were fulfilled.

In crucial ways, unfortunately, they were not and, as a result, Columbia has short-changed the very students and faculty the Trustees pledged to support. For that reason, I feel compelled to take this action.

 

Bebé boomers: Mas Media's Raul Medina on America 2050

Fascinating thinking on what the 2012 election tells us about our changing culture in the US on boston.com, "We've come (and are going) a long way, bebé."

Here's a taste:

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old. - See more at: http://www.boston.com/business/blogs/global-business-hub/2013/03/weve_come_and_a.html#sthash.roT2znc2.dpuf

So if we circle back (or zoom ahead, as it were) to 2050 when Quinceañeras—fifteenth birthday parties—will certainly be as well known as confirmations and bat mitzvahs, what will that election look like? For starters, one in every three voters will be of Hispanic origin. Hispanics will be younger than the general population. The average Hispanic will be 31 years old.

Happy birthday, Jeff

 

 

Jeff Stamps, who would have turned 69 today.

Jim Ware to Yahoo: "You've got a management system problem"

Take a listen to my colleague, Jim Ware's interview last night, on Turi Ryder's WGN radio show on "The perks and catches of working remotely." Jim's been thinking about where work is headed for a very long time and is a thoughtful commentator. He is clear that he hasn't studied Yahoo! but, when pressed for what he would say to the company, he pointed out that there is a larger issue here than where people are working. "It used to be we all had to go to the office if we wanted to see people or access our paper files...the office is now operating in a free market. Marissa Mayer should have known this and maybe she does... but these companies need to create an office work environment where people want to be there."

Marissa Mayer, we need to talk: This genie is way out of the bottle

Dear Marissa,

Apparently, I'm not the only one who has a word or two to say to you. Tom Ashbrook (On Point, "Yahoos Ban on Working From Home") is holding forth with some savvy guests even as I type; Maureen Dowd has a biting op-ed in yesterday's NY Times ("Get Off Of Your Cloud"); and the bloggers have gone wild. Not to mention that I've received numerous emails including this one from a client: "Wish you could write a counter to this and have it published.  This does not help the cause..."*

I regret that I've had to make you a category here but with so much emotion swirling around the HR edict ordering all-hands on the Yahoo! deck, let's begin with some facts:

1. As a computer scientist, you might want to look at real data. There is little evidence to support the notion that people need to be face-to-face to collaborate OR innovate. Yes, there are moments to come together but not perpetually. Professor Tom Allen set the lie to this idea 35 years ago with his ground-breaking research for Digital Equipment Corporation. Simply, if people are more than 50 meters (150 feet) apart, the "probability that two people will communicate [at least once a week] as a function of distance separating them" plummets. Here's the chart:

2. "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?" With two business school professors, we researched 54 high-performing teams in 26 companies across 15 industries and the resounding conclusion from the data was "yes, indeed." Here's the quick summary from the Harvard Business Review where the study was published as "Best Practices:"

Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a variety of specialists to work on them. But often the best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe, perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.

The conclusion for Yahoo!: unless you're doing very simplistic projects, i.e. routine processing chores, stocking shelves, and the like, you're staffing your teams incorrectly. If you're looking for innovation, you need diversity, the subject of many studies before and after ours.There is no way that you have that diversity in toto within driving distance of your Silicon Valley. It's 2013, not 1950, the year the number of manufacturing workers reached its peak in the US.

3. Which leads right into this point. As per the title of this post, the genie is waaaay out of the bottle. Do you actually believe that people today work in intact teams? When you force everyone to co-locate, you're most likely not bringing in the people who actually work together. Do you have contractors? Partners in other companies? Suppliers? Vendors? Developers in India/China/Philippines/Singapore? Do your sales people spend their time in the office? (If your answer to this one is yes, perhaps we've pinpointed a big part of your problem.)

Unless Yahoo! has completely turned its back on development trends that are, say, as old as the Internet itself, team members are scattered around the globe. Yahoo! should do a study of where its team members are situated. We can place a pretty confident bet that they're not all in proximity of Yahoo! HQ.

And that's just the start of what's wrong with this 20th century edict.

4. Let's talk about culture for a moment, one of the big points of the "YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION--DO NOT FORWARD" HR memo that All Things D's Kara Swisher had up within moments, it seems, and which has been published everywhere.

Forcing people into the office hardly builds loyalty. It's abundantly clear that Yahoo! is attempting a massive and quick turnaround of its culture. The insults about the workforce, as reflected in posts around the web, are legion. The parking lot is only half-full at 9:30 AM. Stopping right there, in some companies, this is regarded as a virtue, meaning that carpooling and the like are working, cutting down on carbon emissions. (For more on this, take a look at the pioneering climate initiative at Unilever, which has coupled aggressive carbon reduction gains with new ways of working initiatives, both increasing productivity and innovation and reducing travel miles.)

There are equally numerous reports on the new Google-esque perks at Yahoo! -- better food, dry cleaning services, nicer digs, for example. What builds culture is commitment, positive reinforcement, and challenging work. If you think people aren't coming into the office because they don't like the food, I strongly recommend that you commission a study on this.

Likewise, do you have evidence that people don't collaborate? That people truly are slacking off at home? Data in study after study indicates that people are more productive when they are able to get up, do whatever morning things they have to do at home (tend to kids/parents/animals/themselves) and then get right to work, saving needless hours on the highway. Hello? Aren't we talking about a bit of traffic on 101?

A most startling stat on this, "The hard truth about telecommuting," from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review last June by Mary Noonan and Jennifer Glass and excerpted in the Dec 26 Scientific American: telecommuters on average work 5-7 hours longer per week.

5. 24/7. After ordering people back to their cubbies, are you also prohibiting them from working at home? Consider what you're saying in the-now-much-quoted HR memo to Yahoos: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. Some of the best decisions and insights comes from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and important impromptu meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together." OK, Yahoos. Turn off your phones at home; don't check your mail first thing in the morning (or last at night); and absolutely do not call from your cars. That applies to you, too, Marissa. Are you referring to your "speed and quality" when communicating from, as reported, your 14-day maternity leave?

6. I nearly can't bring myself to comment on this last point for which the young mother-CEO has been excoriated from GMT-12 to GMT+12. A few of your quotes are enraging to other parents, as you've heard. Just this one will follow you for life: "The baby's been easy. The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be." I had "easy" babies too but I found it best to keep that under my hat. Most babies are not and it's quite hurtful to other women to rub it in, i.e. stuff a rag in that comment forevermore. And it's irking your coworkers that you have permission to build a nursery next to your office (even if you paid for it). When are you building sidecars for all the other new moms?

Meanwhile, Marissa, please invite in, say, 40 or 400 or 4000 of the mothers, not to mention the fathers, in your company and listen to what it's like to get through a day. I'm watching a software executive who's your age with major responsibilities, as she is juggling young kids, big corporate decisions, a lot of travel, and being a good family member while her husband, although he doesn't travel as much, is also running on fumes as he works very long hours, cooks, and tells endless stories to the kids. And they can afford help.

There is something profoundly unglued, unrealistic, and uncompassionate in your new approach. Virtual Teams work -- I know. I wrote the book. Maybe you should read it.

--Jessica Lipnack, CEO, consultant, writer, mother, grandmother, and unsolicited advice-giver

 

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpuf

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together. - See more at: http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/#sthash.BzYp4u24.dpu

*For the record, I posted the news as soon as it reached me last Friday.

Seriously? Yahoo CEO lassoing everyone back to the office???

Keen reader Joe Wehr just spotted this post by Kara Swisher on All Things D about Yahoo's CEO calling everyone back to the office. Hard to believe in Feb 2013 but here's the link. Perhaps Marissa Meyer needs to read, ahem, Virtual Teams?

Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote).

While I failed to make sticky buns, others stormed the kitchen

Do you spend time looking at other people's grocery carts when checking out? (Or should I say, do you check out other people's carts?) I do. Just as much as I am prone to be distracted by other people's conversations (I think we call it eavesdropping) in restaurants.

I did the same during the flurry of grocery procurement prior to Nemo. I wondered what the person in front of me was doing with all that fennel. And they probably wondered why I needed so many bananas (good question). As with many others, I now have a well-stocked freezer, though we also did enjoy a few great meals: roast chicken a la Thomas Keller (nothing simpler: salt! that's it!); Pork Chops Normand (also easy and scrumptious, see Silver Palate); and a huge brunch of eggs, hash browns, sausage, and toast). I never made it to the George School sticky buns, whose recipe is here--sent to me by two of my classmates after I posted my mid-storm plea on Facebook.

The Boston Globe has a nice round-up of how people passed the time in the kitchen, cooking in the dark, in the fireplace, and, normally, as did I -- no power loss here.

Blizzards of activity heated Twitter kitchens.

Face-to-face for the Oreo tweet

Being a three-screen watcher of the Stupor Bowl, which tells you a lot about my interest in football (see for example, The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football, introduced to me by my nevertheless-Patriots-loving Daughter #1), I had a great time tweeting during the famous Lights-out of 2013. (Further disclosure: When the Pats are winning, I can't resist regional pride.)

Thus the now-famous Oreo tweet came up right away in my feed, even though I don't follow the cookie (never mind, I can taste it just thinking of it, scraping my teeth across the icing, dissolving the cookie on my tongue -- you're welcome, Nabisco, for the commercial).

Which made me curious about how decisions were made such that the tweet was up nearly simultaneously with lights-out. Lacking the time to turn this into investigative journalism requiring my actually contacting the ad agency responsible for it (360i.com), I did the next best thing: I read the posts from others. 

According to Buzzfeed's "How Oreo Got that Twitter Ad Up So Fast" (thank you, Rachel Sanders), the answer is co-location:

"We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity," agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. "Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes."

...The key? Having Oreo executives in the room, ready to pull the trigger.

My questions: Could they have made the decision as quickly if everyone was not in the room? Who came up with the idea originally? Were they shouting to one another? Sharing one large screen? Several? Were the Oreo execs making the call on every tweet (they had a near constant flood of tweets, of which this was only one)? Had they set out operating agreements for what would go live and what needed approval beforehand? Were the most senior Oreo execs online and watching the quick-acting team that garnered so much buzz so quickly?

Someone will make this a case study in social media, for sure. And it will be interesting to see what lessons are drawn about collaboration and proximity from it.

 

 

 

 

 

Following directions from paperblog

I was approached by paperblog.com, asking if I'd like to register my blog with them. After consulting my panel of experts, i.e. I posted a notice in my status on Facebook, asking if anyone knew anything about paperblog, I decided to do it. Paperblog is an aggregator, based in Paris, with a nice layout and nice content so, hey, thanks, er, merci, Emma@paperblog for asking.

After several failed attempts to register (not sure why), I received this note from Emma this morning:

Hi Jessica,

We see that you have successfully submitted your blog. Before your articles can appear on Paperblog however, there is one last step- you must authorize your blog by following the steps on this page: http://en.paperblog.com/flux/validate/

The easiest way to do this would be to add the Paperblog phrase to any existing or new article on your blog: I confirm the subscription of this blog to the Paperblog service under the username jlipnack

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Best Wishes,
Emma

Therefore:

I confirm the subscription of this blog to the Paperblog service under the username jlipnack

In the future, now: presenting virtually

A little while back, I referenced the interesting invitation I received to deliver the closing keynote for a Unilever group that was meeting in London. Instead of traveling to London (Windsor, to be precise), I was asked to stay put and speak from home -- an apt invitation, given the topic: virtual working.

Thus ensued one of the great collaborations I've been part of. Karl James, who runs The Dialogue Project, was facilitating the meeting. He's the person who "sourced" me and who served as the liaison to the Unilever folks. He, in turn, introduced me to Jacobina Plummer, who runs Unilever's "Agile Working" program, a sophisticated company-wide approach that is critical to the global enterprise's ability to achieve its aggressive environmental goals, reported on here in Environmental Leader's recent article:

More than half of Unilever’s factories achieved the goal of sending no waste to landfill in 2012, prompting the company to speed up by five years its goal of zero waste to landfill by 2020.

By the end of 2015, Unilever’s 252 factories worldwide will not sent any non-hazardous waste to landfill, the company announced today.

To understand the scope of what Unilever is doing, read Mike Prokopeak's July, 2011 article in Talent Management, "No Office, No Problem." Here you can see how one company has designed its environmental goals alongside its workplace policies such that smaller real estate footprints and less travel to and from the office go hand-in-hand.

In all my years working in this area, Unilever is the first company I've run into that has married these two aspects so comprehensively. Typically, companies set their environmental goals without paying much heed to what this will mean for the overall way of working. Or they send people home to work -- with a laptop and not much else. This systemic approach bears study, if not downright mimicing.

But back to the point of this piece. First I spoke with Karl (via Skype between London and Boston); then I spoke with Jacobina (via Skype and gotomeeting between Christchurch, New Zealand, and Boston). I next interviewed four people who would be attending the conference where I was to speak: one near London, one in Pretoria, South Africa, one in Istanbul, Turkey, and the last, a Brazilian woman, who happened to be in New Jersey (she said she was considering driving up to Boston so we could meet face-to-face but the timing didn't work out). The only one of these meetings that had to be rescheduled (other than the one where I managed to doublebook calls so I guess that makes two) was the one where the person was closest. She got stuck in traffic. And I did a Skype session with the woman who would introduce me that day and frankly I have no idea where she was when we spoke -- Switzerland, maybe?

After gathering input for the talk, Karl, Jacobina, and I spoke again via gotomeeting (great video fidelity, by the way). I followed up by drafting my presentation, which the three of us then went over slide by slide using gotomeeting. Karl and Jacobina both had suggestions, which I incorporated before sending the next and practically final draft -- were it not for the fact that such careful preparation was done onsite that I got a last-minute request, about 45 minutes before we went live, to revise one more slide that didn't project properly.

The night before the event, we did a dry run -- at midnight UK time, meaning that the folks there were up past 1 AM. Wifi in the hotel was overloaded as all the attendees had finally gone back to their rooms, which meant we couldn't get a steady video signal. Ultimately, they turned wifi off during my presentation and the signal was nearly perfect.

OK, so what was so special about this? I always vet my presentations with clients and usually have a back-and-forth to fine-tune. This was the most global preparation I've ever done and I say this having done quite a number of these virtual presentations. And by the time we were done with all the preparation, Karl, Jacobina, and I felt like a team. The image here is of Karl during our runthrough right before we went live last Wednesday, with me in the lower right of the projection.

Nicely done, one and all.

 

"As networks become more efficient, they become more modular"

Carl Zimmer's National Geographic article, "The Parts of Life," merits reading -- and rereading. The structure of networks, meaning their level of complexity, is difficult to understand but Zimmer moves carefully to lay out an experiment conducted by Jeff Clune (University of Wyoming), Jean-Baptiste Mouret (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris), and Hod Lipson (Cornell University). If I've got this right, their experiments indicated that "minimally-linked networks spontaneously produce[s] modules."

Why is this important? Modules are the basis of life -- parts make up wholes, what Jeff Stamps talked about in his book, Holonomy, drawing on Arthur Koestler's elegant term holon, meaning whole-part. As Zimmer says:

We’re made of parts. Our skull is distinct from our spine. Our liver does not grade subtly into our intestines. Of course, the parts have to be connected for us to work as a whole: a skull completely separated from a spine is not much good to anyone.

This is obvious in physical and biological systems, viz. see Herbert Simon's classic, "The Architecture of Complexity." But what about social systems? Do minimally linked networks/organizations spontaneously produce modular groups of mini-networks that can specialize to solve problems?

What is just-the-right-number of links to produce just-the-right-kind of modules to get work done? Complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman has written about this, postulating that there is some apt number of links to create that "place" between order and chaos. See this white paper that we wrote some time ago, "Organizing at the Edge of Chaos," which plays with the tradeoff between too many links and too few in organizations.

Masters of Networks: Policy and Network Science in the same room

Last week's Masters of Networks conference in Venice, which I blogged about earlier this month, brought network science down to earth and policy making into the 21st century. Now that I've offended both groups, let me explain.

News flash: typically policy makers meet with policy makers and network scientists meet with their own kind. "Masters of Networks" brought them together with the intent of using network science to tackle the application of policy to real-world problems.

Millie Begovic's post today describes her presentation, including how social media and techniques familiar to developers -- rapid prototyping, continuous engagement, and "weak ties" among networks, which I touch on in this post (and is similar to what Millie is calling "loose networks" here (correct me if I'm wrong, Millie!) -- can be used to deal with the kinds of problems policy makers sometimes find intractable. Stitch some network theory together with au courant policy approaches and we can look forward to some very creative breakthroughs.

This convening in Venice is a great step forward as everyone struggles to turn the pretty pictures of networks -- the complex strands that comprise network maps -- into images with meaning that offer practical suggestions.

Wolfram on Facebook

I spend a lot of time thinking about networks, trying to comprehend what network science is telling us, frankly trying to make sense of the endless network visualizations being generated. Of course, I tried out LinkedIn Inmap and will certainly try Facebook's Graph Search as soon as I'm deemed linked enough to be worthy.

So when I woke up to an email from Wolfram Alpha offering to analyze my Facebook network ("Personal Analytics for Facebook," I clicked and clicked and clicked until I got a very full report. Interesting, very Facebook-y:

• My most commented on photo? My darling twin grandsons? No, no. My dog, Belle, the day she died.
• Are most of my friends men or women? 58%:41%
• Oldest friend is my cousin, Julius Blank (98); youngest is my namesake cousin, Jessica Lipnack (22)
• Distribution of my friends' ages follows ye olde belle curve, with most exactly my age (ah, George School classmates)
• My friend with the most mutual friends is Rusty Barnes (go, Rusty!), whom I know through writing and have met only once
• The top 10 friends with the most friends are not people I really know at all (I have a liberal acceptance policy which my children have excoriated me for)
• After the US, Canada, and the UK, I have the most friends in the Netherlands (I've been there many times for work)
• My top commenter is a boyfriend from my youth :)

Having been unsuccessful posting a clip of one of the graphs, I leave it to you to generate your own maps. Meanwhile, I'll think about what this means. Something about all kinds of proximity trumping everything else -- most friends are relatively close to me physically, most are my age, many are writers... I better diversify -- quick!

More seriously, having this kind of analytical output from the graphs (meaning network maps in plain English) is what makes them useful. I could have looked at endless webs of the same material and not easily grasped things like the fact that I mostly post on Tues at 9 AM. Is that useful info? If I were a deeper analyst, it probably is. If I were marketing, then comparing that with response would be truly useful. Now I go off to ponder, at 8:15 on a Thursday, why Tuesdays?

Which organizations have the best virtual/flexible/agile work policies?

This is a request for information: I'm looking for examples of how companies, nonprofits, and NGOs (even government agencies) implement their flexible work policies. Also known as virtual/distributed/agile/collaborative work approaches, these guidelines can cover everything from carpooling to work-from-home to hoteling to who-knows-what.

I'm gathering this info for a talk I'm giving for a global company--virtually, of course--at the end of the month.

Which companies have the most innovative approaches? And what pitfalls have they encountered? As always, I will credit anyone who responds in my presentation, a practice I've adhered to since I began giving talks umpteen years ago--and write a post here also giving you credit.

Thanks so much!

Restorative justice with The Dialogue Project

About six weeks ago, I received an email with the subject line "Interest...:"

Good morning Jessica!

I was wondering if you do invited talks on working virtually?

I’m running an event for a senior team at [a well known European company] with whom I have a long standing relationship.

My expertise is in dialogue and perhaps we could consider doing an interview with you to close a two day session in late January? Or maybe you’d prefer to do a talk, in person or virtually!

Do let me know if it’s worth us having a chat on Skype or something about this.

By the way – I read your writing about Jeff on your blog and found it incredibly moving and eloquent. Thank you.

Yours,

Karl James
Director
The Dialogue Project
20 Temple Sheen Road
London
SW14 7QG
+44 (0) 20 8878 0929
Twitter: @2plus2makes5

What ensued were a couple of conversations during which Karl explained the engagement and we developed the kind of rapport one does with like-minded people whom you meet only over Skype or on the phone. I sent him an essay I'd written about New Zealand; he sent me a link to an extraordinary radio program he's done for Radio 4 in the UK, which airs today.

Listen to "A Different Kind of Justice." Keep yourself busy while listening in whatever way makes you comfortable but you don't want to miss this. Karl (by the way, also a theatre director, for example, Malvolio at the New Victory Theatre in New York right now) brings two people into conversation. And what ensues is remarkable. He should teach us all how to do it.

And, yes, I accepted the invitation, which turned out to have many unexpected gifts attached.