Endless Knots

Nohria new dean at Harvard Business School

Harvard University President Drew Faust just announced that Nitin Nohria, an insightful academic who early on recognized the importance of networks to global business strategy, is the new dean of HBS. "He's an outstanding scholar, teacher, and mentor, with a global outlook and an instinct for collaboration across traditional boundaries," Faust said.

From the announcement* on the B-school's site:

A scholar of leadership and organizational change, Nohria has previously been the School's senior associate dean for faculty development and chair of its organizational behavior unit. Current co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and a member of the HBS faculty since 1988, he will take up his new role on July 1.

Congrats, Nitin. Very happy for you, the institution, and for networks.

Virtual high school reunion?

My friend Bill writes, asking a question I'm also interested in as I can't make it to my important high school reunion this year. Anyone know?

Hi Jessica,
Have you ever heard of a H.S. class doing your virtual meeting kind of stuff in lieu of going to the expense of flying or driving from all over the place just to get to a disappointing town with few accommodations -- like Tenafly, NJ.?

Studying Facebook

Seriously. At Bowdoin College, College Offers Facebook Sociology Course.

"The Republic of Letters:" The Electronic Enlightenment Project

Thanks to Tom Stewart, who in turn thanks John Hagel for this network discovery: 18th-century social network of ideas, carried out through letters, and now on YouTube, having been mapped by Stanford's "Mapping the Republic of Letters" study. Assistant French Professor Dan Edelstein, principal investigator, describes how ideas spread via letters. Voltaire, for example, wrote 15,000. Cynthia Haven reports:

Edelstein, principal investigator for "Mapping the Republic of Letters" with history Professor Paula Findlen, has mapped thousands of letters that were exchanged during the period of the Enlightenment to uncover hidden truths about the "Republic of Letters."   The latter is "a shorthand that scholars use to refer to writers and philosophers and clergymen and other early modern intellectuals who corresponded across Europe and even across the world," said Edelstein.

...According to Edelstein, "We tend to think of networks as a modern invention, something that only emerged in the Age of Information. In fact, going all the way back to the Renaissance, scholars have established themselves into networks in order to receive the latest news, find out the latest discoveries and circulate the ideas of others."

"We've known about these correspondences for a long time – some of them have been published – but no one has been able to piece together how these individual networks fit into a complete whole, something we call the Republic of Letters."

Go, Geek Doctor! @jhalamka

What a thrill! Our very own fave Shakuhachi player--and doctor/CIO--John Halamka (or see this bio) is the cover boy on today's NY Times Business Page in Steve Lohr's "New Programs Aim to Lure Young into Digital Jobs" as the emblem of nerdiness. He wears it proudly, even posing as the mirror to his brilliant little 10-year-old self winning a science fair.

I've written about John myself (see The Standard), done wacky things with him, recommended him as a guest on BusinessWeek TV, and enjoyed having him join the Margaret Fuller birthday celebrations each year. May 23 is his birthday too and he's made a practice of bringing his flute along.

Which gives me license to republish this picture.

Congrats, John. The world's best example of geekiness, viz., he doesn't even mention the NY Times piece on his blog today.

Stop the drop(outs)

Freedom House (I've been on the board since 1995) has been hosting community forums throughout its 60-year existence. This one, coming up on October 20, 2009, is about the difficult issue of high school dropout.

“Getting Back On Track”

What’s going on with Dropout Prevention and Recovery in Boston?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Freedom House, 14 Crawford Street, Dorchester, MA 02121
(617) 445-3700

Karen L. Payne, President Boston Branch NAACP, hosts; Phil Jackson, Director, Alternative Education, and Irvin Scott, Academic Superintendent, both from Boston Public Schools, keynote.

Scene 6: Too many questions

Here's a suggestion for the people who think up the routines for patient room visits by medical staff. Step back for a second and try to consider things from the patients' perspective.

What am I talking about? "My person" is visited by many people every day, a large number of whom ask precisely the same questions. Not sort of the same questions but precisely the same questions. Among those who pose these questions: doctors, nurses, fellows, residents, interns, and medical students.

This process is both the way that staff learns what's going on and also provides necessary education for the students. I respect this. But when the questions begin by waking patients up to ask them, only to have another person come in, say, 15 minutes later to ask the same thing, then something is not quite right.

A few days ago, my person respectfully asked that the medical students at least come in with the residents so that there were fewer interruptions in the early morning (by which I mean 5:30 am). Thus, a note was taped to the door saying something along the lines that medical students should consult the nurses before coming into the room.

I'm not sure what happened but my person, who's had very little sleep in the past few days due to protracted testing late into the night plus the beloved dawn interrogations, was trying to take a nap this afternoon when a medical student knocked loudly and came into the room. I don't believe this person did stop at the desk to ask for permission because she made quite a bit of noise, even as I tried to fend her off. Regardless, she started to ask the very same questions that had been asked barely 45 minutes earlier...even as she could see the patient was sleeping.

Perhaps she was embarrassed. I don't know but she made a clatter leaving, both in the way she closed the curtain and the way she shut the door. I'm sure she's a very nice person, I'm sure she needs to learn, but someone needs to think this through a little better. She doesn't need to learn more than my person needs to sleep.

My solution was to ask the nurse to put a note on the door saying simply: "Patient sleeping. Do not disturb." I removed it promptly when my person woke up.

  

Antioch, again!

By George, they did it. College alum have purchased Antioch College back from the university, officially today. Congratulations to my fellow/felless alums. A triumph in such tough times. And special kudos to the negotiating committee: Lee Morgan, grandson of Antioch's storied president, Arthur Morgan, and Matthew Derr, both college grads, these two repping the college; and University trustees Dan Fallon, also a college grad, and my dear friend, Jack Merselis, himself a graduate of Antioch New England.

As Matt Derr was quoted in the Yellow Springs News (in whose press room I spent every Thurs night setting type for the Antioch Record, the college rag):

“Antioch College was one of the top colleges in the country in the late 1960s and it fell on hard times,” Derr said. “Here we are reviving it. There’s never been a story like this in higher education. No one thought we could pull it off.”

(And I am hereby creating a new category for this blog: Miracles)

If you can't join 'em, swim 'em

Virtual teams gone to the next level. And, ahem, they're in my beloved home state of Pennsylvania, or, as my father preferred to call it, Penciltucky.

According to Tamar Lewin ("For Colleges, Small Cuts Add Up to Big Savings"), who follows education for The New York Times, budget cuts caused some virtual creativity to transpire between two colleges, one near Philadelphia, the other on the opposite side of Harrisburg:

At Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., the women’s swim team held a “virtual swim meet” with Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, about 112 miles away. Each team swam in its home pool, then compared times to determine the winners. (“We probably saved $900 on bus travel,” said William G. Durden, Dickinson’s president.)

Interestingly, all the other anecdotes in the story are about typical cost-saving measures, like cutting out a traditional bus tour, eliminating window washing, and picking up trash weekly rather than daily.

I wonder how many other places are being as creative as Dickinson and Bryn Mawr. And I wonder who won. Just spent about half an hour searching for the results and for reactions from students, trying to find out how the whole thing worked. How, in fact, did they "compare times?" Did they have video? Audio? If anyone knows, please post. This is interesting!

"It takes a lifetime to change the world"

I'll leave it to you to figure out who among them is the godchild (disgusing that person's privacy even further) but a moment like this cannot pass without record.

On Friday morning in a drenching rain at a school that experienced the kind of tragedy just a few months ago that most institutions would shun mentioning at a celebration, Concord Academy held its commencement exercises.

As the festivities began, we were all holding our breath, I'm sure, because of the death of one of the students' classmates in February at a party (dozens of tributes here).

I would guess that many institutions would have mentioned this only in passing at graduation but from the very first speaker on (the chair of the Concord Academy board) the awfulness was acknowledged. When horrible things are met at the front door, it allows everyone to come in. Jake Dresden, retiring head of Concord (we're all going to miss you and Pat, Jake), continued, also talking frankly about what happened ...and so it went until the commencement speaker, Eric Lander, came to the podium. His son was graduating too.

Need I mention the anticipation of ho-hums that always accompanies the moment before the graduation speaker begins? More platitudes in the offing, we all think, worried that the person might have read all the other commencement speeches online and threaded them together, thinking that would be new.

But Eric did something different. He talked about the future for these kids against a measure that they could perceive. His refrain:

It takes a lifetime to change the world.

It was a beautiful speech, delivered with passion, drawing on his own experience as a very accomplished scientist -- and a parent.

Here are some notes from my little notebook that's always in my purse:

What is 50 years?

It's the time it takes to change the world.

In 1953, Crick and Watson published their first ONE PAGE paper on the double helix.

Fifty years later, the Human Genome project was completed.

A lifetime is enough to change the world.

What is 50 years?

It was approximately 50 years from the time Vannevar Bush first proposed the idea for memex, the precusor to hypertext, aka what we now know as the web.

About 50 years passed between the Montgomery bus boycotts and the election of Barack Obama.

And only 40 years have passed since the Stonewall riots, arguably the night the fight began for equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, and when the first same-sex marriage rights bills were passed in state legislatures.

It's not entirely an accident that it takes a lifetime to change the world.

And he also offered this very sage advice:

Your life cannot be planned in advance but will be assembled from pieces of your passion.

The projects of a lifetime come in all sizes.

The single greatest project of a lifetime is having children.

And...it's utterly impossible to plan in advance how it will all play out.

Well said, Eric. And good luck to the godchild.

(Tiny itty bitty disclosure: Daughter #2 graduated from Concord Academy, providing her with an unparalleled education during her last two years of high school and launching her on her career as an artist.)