This is Sunday morning, a time when people in my culture are used to receiving or giving sermons on the greater meaning of life and the practical applicability of the Golden Rule ("do unto others.."). Today's modest effort has been stimulated by a recent book, The Living Universe, by an old friend, Duane Elgin, whose 1981 book, Voluntary Simplicity, still resonates almost 30 years after its publication.
Our first book came out at about the same time as Duane's. In Networking: The First Report and Directory (see our books), Jessica and I recognized networks as a new form of organization in the grassroots movements of the 1970s. In the "report" part of the book, we chronicled the emergence of groups that were to become the centers for today's nonprofit world. So we often crossed paths with Duane and soon became friends.
Duane is a big thinker and a simple liver, and has devoted a lifetime to the notion of human transformation and inspiring positive change. He was a futurist researcher with SRI International in the 1970s, and worked on a number of cutting edge projects including Changing Images of Man, a stunning report with Joseph Campbell, Willis Harmon, and O.W. Markley.
His latest book hinges on a simple question, one you can take a moment to answer yourself before you go on:
Is the universe dead or alive?
Deadness is the prevailing scientific view, a container of inert matter that is the physical layer upon which the miracle of life grows. However, most people answer quickly, intuitively--in a "blink"--that of course the thing-as-a-whole is more alive than dead.
For me, it crystallized another question to pose about human beings, which you might also answer:
Are our organizations dead or alive?
Deadness is the prevailing view. The deadness of inert matter is found in our conventional "machine model" of organizations, particularly Big Ones, and most especially government ones. Many of our friends who promote networks dismiss the physical hierarchy as an antiquated machine relic rather than an evolving human organization that is becoming more networked. Our organizations are our greatest unexploited resource for addressing the confluence of disaster, change, and opportunity that defines our transitional time, so the answer "dead or alive" really matters.
While organizations cannot live without people, they are also different from people, yet still distinctly human--and alive. Two great networks--one social, the other organizational--intersect in the interrelated configuration of jobs, positions, and roles. Together, we get stuff done that as individuals we cannot do alone (see our Working Papers for some deep diving on this theme).
GM was the epitome of the industrial model, the archetype of the impersonal machine organization. 'Nuf said with Chrysler already in bankruptcy and GM headed there shortly.
Our organizations never were machines, but regarding them as such ensures a failure to adapt and learn and grow.
So this is where The Living Universe took me. If you enjoy a mix of religious and scientific views on the how the universe lives and why it matters, you should read Duane's newest book.
As we posted earlier, the Discovery Network's Science Channel (thank you, Joe Wehr) premieres "Connected: The Real Matrix" tonight, Sunday, February 15, at 9pm EST (and PST). As our friends at Future of Work note in their cross-post, "the program will also be repeated on Monday, February 16, at
12:00 AM, and on Tuesday, February 17 at4 AM (again, EST and PST).
Maybe not the greatest times, but you can always set your trusty DVR to
pick it up for you."
The TV show emphasizes the general applicability of the new network science to complex systems. We here at NetAge have applied this same science to organizations. As we've written, OrgScope is the tool we developed to visualize and analyze organizations as networks. So the show is the perfect lead-in to the next installment of our NetAge Working Papers series on management science for networked organizations:
We present the concept of
“organization network science” as an application of the new network science, as described in the "Connected" show. As described in this working paper, the new science
includes the concept of “scale-free networks” and their
signature pattern of hubs developed by Albert-László
Barabási and others. A second stream of new network thinking,
personified by Duncan Watts, reveals how a few “shortcuts”
dramatically reduce path lengths to form “small-world
networks.” We reframe generic network principles of growth and
“preferential attachment” for use in
understanding and managing organizations as networks. At the paper’s
end, we retrace in organizational terms a Barabási simulation
of how a network grows, and address the development of hierarchical
networks.
Here are a few paragraphs from the paper:
Background on the Network Revolution
Over the past few
years, a new “science of networks” has rapidly woven
across the physical, biological, and social domains, bringing the
simplicity of common characteristics to diverse complex systems.
Our field work at the
leading edge of global organizational development confirms that this
new “linked” science applies directly and immediately to
highly-complex organizations. It is our hope that a true
theory-based, data-driven, testable science of “organizational
networks” will enable an historic step-change increase in human
organizational capabilities. Great ambition, but even modest
improvements in collaboration could have widespread application and
deep impact. We believe this new knowledge can substantially improve
our collective ability to work together better, a clear imperative
imposed by the era’s economic interdependence, digital information technologies,
accelerating globalization, and deepening human power to modify
ourselves and the world around us.
So what’s new
about networks according to the latest research? In a phrase, they
are organic, scale-free, small worlds. The new network science
grasps complex networks by their nodes and maps their links,
generating useful metrics related to configurations that help
identify hubs, shortcuts, and all manner of characteristics that are
directly applicable to organizations.
Sitting here in the 42nd parallel North, snow a foot high on the picnic table outside my window, and lows of 7F tonight (that would be -13C), my mind turns to summer. Turns to summer with a little help, that is, from my friend Doug Lea, whose writing about his many gardens has fascinated me for years (viz. "onions and
beans are like dragons in a medieval drama"). Writing beautifully about gardening is as difficult as the gardening genre Doug discusses here. I like this piece so much that I'm tempted to tug phrase after phrase up here, into the intro, but better, I think, to let you discover his lovely turns and his wisdom about gardening yourself. (Someone get this man a book contract.) Last week he posted this great bit of garden-think to his Facebook page; I asked to re-post here. Thus, for all who dig the earth and love mud pies...
Doug with the artist (and his wife) Julie Savage Lea
Intensive Gardening: A Way of Knowledge By Douglass Lea
For three decades I’ve followed the intensive way of growing
vegetables. It’s a hard calling, best taken up by those with an excess
of time, friends, and vigor – or by those, like me, with an itch to
escape the modern swirl of abstractions and symbols, to connect effort
and result more directly, to find a grounding for self in the ground
itself.
Loosely defined, intensive gardening describes a set of interwoven
techniques that maximize the yield from a limited area and maintain the
long-term usefulness of the soil. Needless to say, it relies heavily on
organic materials.
What does one do? Begin by digging – and then digging and digging again
– until reaching a depth of 36 inches or more. Try, however, to keep
removed strata intact, for one completes the “double-digging” process
by putting loosened soil back where it came from, each layer in proper
order. By raising garden beds a foot or more above surrounding paths,
double-digging creates a fluffy texture that warms quickly in spring,
keeps a steady temperature throughout summer, drains well with little
erosion, retains moisture for dry months, and breathes easily.
Having survived a grueling test, one then mixes the top layers of newly
aerated soil with compost, manure, bonemeal, and potash. The catechism
here is unequivocal: industrial amendments undermine soil viability,
weaken the integrity of plant structure, and invite pests and plagues
to make a wasteland. Sir Albert Howard, founder of modern organic
farming, said it bluntly: “Artificial manures lead to artificial foods,
which lead to artificial people.”
Next, one inseminates the raised beds with the seeds or seedlings of
diverse vegetables, herbs, and flowers, combining the varieties that
flourish as companions and separating those that attack one another.
Basil likes tomatoes, and the two should forever be joined together, in
sickness as in health, on the plate as in the belly. But onions and
beans are like dragons in a medieval drama, condemned to an eternity of
ceaseless battle. Never plant them together.
Companion planting is complex enough, but it is overlaid by the equally
strong and precise demands of succession planting, closecropping, and
intermixing. Now the fun begins.
In succession planting, one works with an eye focused on the cycle of
maturity for each variety, looking to fit the basic requirements and
patterns of each into a larger whole. Will the corn planted today grow
fast enough to shade the late peas and prolong their season of
usefulness? How many weeks before the borage explodes?
In closecropping, one transplants seedlings into closely spaced
geometric patterns – chiefly triangles and hexagons – to create, once
plants have matured and leaves touched, a microclimate that moderates
the vicissitudes of the macroclimate. Skillful closecropping eventually
generates a living mulch that protects the soil and its microorganisms
and discourages the growth of noxious weeds.
In intermixing, as the word implies, one intermingles varieties as much
as possible – given the imperatives of succession planting and
closecropping – in an effort to approach the mysteriously productive
randomness of nature and avoid the infestations that descend wherever
vast stretches of a single crop are cultivated year after year. Assign
perfidious monocropping to the putative efficiencies of industrial
agriculture, not to the mysteries of intensive gardening.
Having outlined the norms that govern intensive gardening, I think it’s
time to grapple with the deviations. And they are legion.
In the final analysis, I’ve learned, the garden only partly belongs to
me. Other creatures, both animal and vegetable, seem to have equally
strong claims to my domain. And they have been waiting patiently for
someone just like me – bursting with ego and determination – to appear
and bring forth a newly disturbed patch of ground.
In short, my garden harbors a powerful array of biological and
geophysical imperatives that insist on manifesting their own destinies.
They resist the geometric overlays of human design; their chaotic
patterns and turbulent cycles defy the logic of human control. My
garden seems to have a mind of its own.
After three decades, for example, it is quite clear to me that the
primeval forest of the Piedmont wants to repossess my little plot.
Every spring it lets loose a million helicoptering maple seeds in a
relentless effort to impregnate my fluffy beds. Every year I dutifully
pull out the rooted progeny of the spring offensive.
The mere passage of time has also changed my garden, almost beyond
recognition. Having situated my garden in a low, flat, pristine area,
where sun, water, and fertility were plentiful, I fully expected an
endless supply of perfect tomatoes, peppers, onions, salad greens, and
other components of a healthy diet.
Not so. Gradually, I became aware of the extraordinary vigor of my
neighbors’ maples, the shade from which eventually transformed my
painstakingly double-dug, richly composted cornucopia into a shady,
soggy habitat for moss and slugs. Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers
struggled.
I fought back. I decided to gather wine corks from oenophiles living
within a five-mile radius – first, to deploy them as a heat-absorbing
mulch to extend the effective length of the day for my sun-loving
solanaceae and, second, to suppress the weeds attracted to the
disturbed soil. It worked, although I had to wait a few years to be
sure that the additional woody matter was not stimulating the expansion
of slug populations. It didn’t, apparently because residual wines and
tannins in the oak corks are noxious to slugs.
Coping has become my mantra, for change and surprise are the only
permanent features of my garden. To make a garden is to manage in the
middle. A garden is a living, physical manifestation of the dry
principles of compromise. It mediates between nature and culture. Every
garden has its own special conditions, its own unique combination of
vectors. Climate, weather, soil, water, light, and ecological factors
limit the ambitions of human design. One must learn to “design with
nature,” the title of a seminal treatise on the harmonizing of human
occupation with natural processes.
For me, intensive gardening has become a way of knowledge, a portal leading toward larger understandings of the world.
Barack Obama becomes the Chief Hierarch today. What is uniquely different about President Barack Hussein Obama is that he is the Chief Complement as well. This is his genius.
Like presidents before him, he occupies the root position of the Executive Branch of the US government tree. His position stands for the whole executive function, but is a part of a larger whole, whose genesis is the US Constitution. These United States are themselves a whole, comprising states, counties, localities, neighborhoods, and residencies such as ours where people gather on January 20 to witness an inauguration. Hierarchy, nested whole-parts, is a universal organizing principle.
Everyone knows about hierarchy. Few are familiar with its complement.
Complementarity is the second great universal organizing principle, bringing opposites together into one process. Like red states and blue states, the whole "tao" process is stirred by yin-yang opposites of dark and light, yielding and firm, female and male, receptivity and creativity. Each opposite includes and interpenetrates the other.
Neils Bohr, who proposed the wave-particle solution in quantum physics, adopted the yin-yang symbol for his coat-of-arms along with the inscription “Contraria sunt complementa,” opposites are complementary.
From the beginning of his quest, Obama has been the voice of complementarity amid the din of dualism. Black and white. Liberal and conservative. Listen and act. Be firm and be open. He embodies both-and, not either-or.
While other politicians have promised to “bridge the gap,” for Obama it is simply part of who he is. In her excellent NY Times page one piece, “From Books, New President Found Voice,” Michiko Kakutani links the power of voice, the love of learning and thinking, and the “quest to understand his roots.” This quest of a “divided child” for self-creation, lies at the “intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past,” themes elaborated by his inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander.
Self-creation at the intersection of opposites is emergent. From a polarized nation to a complementary one is a transformational step. This will be Obama’s theme this inaugural day. Bringing together while respecting differences. Finding synergies and creativities in new collaborations. Hope and hard work. You and me, working together.
This is the essence of networks: me and we, independence with interdependence.
We've been quite sad here for the past days since the death of Dr. Erwin A. Jaffe, professor, mentor, friend, protector, and door-opener for my husband. Jeff has written a lovely tribute at the website he set up for Erwin some months ago. Erwin wanted to put all of his important thinking in one place on the web, the beginning of which is what you'll find by clicking.
Over the past year, we were able to spend time with Erwin and his wife, Marianne, his other half for 51 years, as he was treated every six weeks at Mass General Hospital here in Boston. We cherish those times, particularly the very first one, last December, when Erwin called to let us know they were here - and a whole slew of his students from many years past crammed into their hotel room. An impromptu party with all of us sitting on the beds, Erwin regaling us with stories, people catching up with one another. These moments flash briefly in our lives, unplanned and full of memories, love, and life. Please look at what Jeff has written. And if you teach, be like Erwin and never stop being part of your students' lives. I love the closing to the piece below, asking people to make donations in his name to "Doctors Without Borders because Erwin Jaffe believed in people without borders."
Tivoli Garden, Copenhagen, 3 June 2005, ducks talking to Danes
Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, got a long Louise Kennedy review in today's Boston Globe. I've been waiting since we saw it this past Wednesday.
A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., which is staging the play until Feb 3, is a stunning space - you walk in on the stage floor, seating stadium style on sides, and "in front," the many tiers that face the set. In this case, being seated on the side seemed an advantage. The play requires thinking from many perspectives and having to watch from an oblique vantage is conceptually fitting.
"The set:" Three large oval light tracks arced at odd angles to one another circle the ceiling. "Electrons" whip around at various intervals, flick on at different times during the performance. Mirrors along the back wall are the stage design; the set comprises three chairs that the characters move around the stage. That's it.
Characters: Three - 1. Niels Bohr (Will LeBow), the Danish physicist who proposed "complementarity," the principle that says, in essence, you can't have black without white - in physics, his theory is connected with waves and particles - one can't exist without the other; 2. Margrethe Bohr (Karen MacDonald), wife of same, mother of six sons (one of whose deaths provides a refrain in the play), typist of manuscripts, and the character who translates physics into English - and humanity - on the stage; and 3. Werner Heisenberg (John Kuntz), the German physicist whose name precedes "uncertainty principle," meaning that once you start studying something, your intervention so changes what you're studying that it's not the same thing as when you started.
Plot: In 1941, Heisenberg arrives in Copenhagen for a meeting with Bohr. "Why did you come to Copenhagen?" Margrethe repeats this line many times in the play. It's the central question that allows the characters to reflect on their lives (when the play opens they're all dead; everything is a flashback), explore physics, argue about collaborating with the Nazis, hint at the nuclear bomb projects underway in both Germany and the US, mourn, walk away, come back, and love one another - even as they all have different memories of how those discussions transpired.
The characters play their parts in relationship to one another and comment to the audience, the work of narration passing among them as they discuss ethics,
science, families, politics, the Nazis, love, skiing, Norway, walking, babies,
anti-semitism, Einstein, drowning, each with its complement, each uncertain.
Powerful, powerful. Complementarity has been a big topic in our house since hubby Jeff used it as one of two core principles (the other was level structure) underlying "human systems theory" in his dissertation. Thus, the play picked up a lot of threads we've talked about.
I kept wishing I had the script in my lap as the ideas are heady, worth thinking about at a slower pace. An editor friend whom we went with said she wished she could have had at the script - would have removed a third of the lines she said. I can understand this. The sheer complexity of the material might be easier to comprehend if the acts were shorter. In one sense, it's a really long lecture about the most abstract of ideas.
Last point, bloggers: Those involved are keeping a blog about the production. "Heisenberg" (who signs his posts "johnny kuntz") is posting about his part, what it's like to rehearse, and such, very interesting. And today, Nick Peterson (thanks for inviting us, Nick) posts an email they received from Heisenberg's son Jochen Heisenberg, professor of physics
at the University of New Hampshire (Jeff's alma mater), who apparently attended the same performance we did:
Thank you indeed for the wonderful experience of seeing this
different Copenhagen performance. As you know, we have been guests at
a number of performances since the NY opening in 2000, and I have had
the burdensome opportunity to become a participant in those symposia
that dealt with the controversy arising out of this play.
What was so refreshing this time was the fact that the play was
allowed to be a drama on many levels and that the one-dimensional,
contentious aspects did not dominate the many-layered personal story.
My friend Jane rarely makes prescriptions but when we talked last week she gave me an Rx: Go see the Pete Seeger movie, this after I described the time we recently spent with the Dalai Lama. Now, to my knowledge, the Dalai Lama doesn't play the bango and Pete Seeger doesn't wear saffron robes but having seen Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, I understand the connection. Jane's preface to the advice was this: clear light comes through both men, the power of conviction.
Documentaries of this sort can easily slip into paeans, genuflections to the great. This one doesn't. First, there's the music, the songs so familiar that they evoke sensations like those of your favorite childhood meal or, pushover that I am, tears. Next, there's the example of a person who believes in a way of being in the world and pursues it, not by stepping on people but by simply continuing. And there's the honesty: his wife of forty-million years, Toshi, says: "If only Pete had been chasing women rather then causes, I could have left him." Anyone with a purpose-driven spouse understands.
Politcally persecuted (HUAC came after Seeger; he was blacklisted; and his career was ruined more than once), Seeger just kept singing. This post's title, "This little machine surrounds hate and forces it
surrender," is lettered on Seeger's bango and explains what five
strings and a big heart can do.
Children have been his greatest audience, a truth I must have absorbed without realizing it. I wrote a scene into a novel where Seeger gives a concert at the summer camp attended by the main character. (Truthfully, I've never heard him in person.)
Watching the film, an image kept recurring: To hire a bus and drive around to the houses of all my friends, load them in, and circle back to the theatre to watch this together. How old-fashioned when I can simply post here, have you click on the trailer and at least get a flavor. Don't miss this film--and don't be surprised if I show up at your door.
Personal note: Just as the singing was to begin at Carolyn Goodman's memorial service,
her son David said that Pete Seeger had been planning to attend but was
not feeling up to it. I never inquired what the problem was so I cannot
report whether he is truly ailing or only had a cold but, at 88, this man has the strength of ten or a hundred.
It's no secret to my readers that I admire the writing of Roland Merullo (a dozen posts here, scan for his name) and so tonight I will be among those listening to his reading from Breakfast with Buddha, which I first blogged here:Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, Mass, 7 PM.
Finished it last night.
Few writers have the range with language that Roland does. Or with emotion. Or with the contemplative life. This book is funny, one of the acceptable ways, so far as this reader is concerned, to grapple with matters of deep spiritual consequence. If you're one of the hundreds of millions (possibly billions as we're up to, what, 6.7 billion hum beans at this point) who has meditated, done yoga, thought about the meaning of life, hungered for something deeper, read a book about how to be happy, or gone to a lecture about Buddhism/Christianity/Judaism/Jainism or whateverism, you want to read this book. Cheerfully, laugh-out-loud funnily, and poignantly, Roland takes his main character, Otto Ringling, from loving family-man and NY publisher to the edge of enlightenment with a cross-country journey that stops for sausage, bowling, and slot machines.
Otto's love for his wife and family are enough to make this book worth the read--few fathers in literature are so bold in their pronouncements--but when you include his very light but profound understanding of human nature and the meaning of existence, you have a treasure. And, oh, his uninvited passenger is a spiritual master, a Rinpoche in robes.
She lived for thirteen years after tests confirmed ovarian cancer, which she intuited long before that. She opened her sealed orders early, knew she was meant to dance, which she did until two days before she died on April 6, 2007.
Last night, two hundred members of Dorothy Hershkowitz's family celebrated her life. Sweet nibbles to welcome guests and then the curtain.
A forty-minute film that Dorothy narrates, a dance biography, with Dorothy looking to the filmmaker, Lynn Bikofsky, and talking to us. Dance has been her "best friend," she says (at her funeral last April, the cantor recalled her saying that dance was her "conversation with God"). When things have been difficult, which they often were (we remember), she goes to her studio or at least "the studio of my mind." Dance is where she works out life, realizes emotion, travels through space. We see clips of her as a very young dancer, and, remarkably, pieces of her major early works, Kaddish, which she choreographed and performed shortly after her father's death (I made seafood lasagna for the cast party), and Monday Morning Quarterback, inspired by an incident where she had to step over a drunk in a subway turnstile. She is still dancing at the end of the film: she had to repeat a take 30 times, 30, when she performs in the halls, not the auditorium, of Dana Farber Cancer Institute, because people keep walking into frame, the background narration a lab technician saying "some people enjoy this test, find it relaxing," as Dorothy throws her body, just a few months before her death, from wall to wall with the knocks of the MRI. And then her teaching one of her last classes, frail, close to the end, her arms floating like no others, and the camera rests on her smile, her very beautiful smile.
People speak, beginning with the cantor, Lorel Zar-Kessler, and then many others. Poems, anecdotes, quotes from letters, a cello concert, cards, and emails Dorothy wrote, Dorothy-aware of death coming soon, her son, Alexander Bohn, recalling that she danced when she put away groceries, her students, her best friend in junior high, her cousin, all recalling a Dorothy the others recognized, and the brave tall man who said Dorothy was his icon of hope after his wife's ovarian cancer diagnosis because D had already lived seven years, (and, as it turned out, did live four years more after his wife died). Surely, as her husband, Dave Evans, has said, her incredibly strong body, all those years of movement, extended her life.
And then they danced, 15 of her students, in a piece choreographed by Joanie Block to "Smile."
Dave said the last words. Gratitude to all, composed and dignified, and very lovingly he tells of two things Dorothy said, the first a few moments after they met: "She poured out her love, meaning Alexander and Jonathan, her sons;" and her last, to the effect of: "No one should go hungry - there is no reason for that."
And then we all sang "You gotta have heart," words on the jump page here.
Repeating what I wrote when she died: Dance on, Dorothy.
A nice article in the Newton, Mass, newspaper where Dorothy lived.
Almost ten summers ago, I attended Richard McCann's autobiography-to-fiction workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts (USA). Many times since, I've heard Richard in my head, quoting Grace Paley: Write in the language of your block. Grace died of breast cancer at 84 yesterday in Thetford, Vermont.
Die in the internet age and much info about you comes together so quickly. Thus it's easy to find Grace's writing, what others think of her work, what she said about herself, even listen to her read. Several focus on her output, not commensurate with her power, they imply. About this, she says in one of the NPR interviews, "I tend to think of my life as one thing. I'm a writer, a teacher, a political activist, a family person, and I hang out a lot and all take time. I probably short-change all of them. I don't write enough, teach enough, hang out with my family enough."
Maybe not enough but eternal.
Heard her phrasing of what Richard described: "Write in the language of your streets and the ordinary language of your time." IMHO, fine advc 4 2day's wrtrs.
A deep NY Times obit from Margalit Fox (also wrote Carolyn Goodman's and Liam Rector's).
She thought well of gossip, a form of story-telling in her view, commending same in men: "A good male gossip is a good person."
