Endless Knots

For Nepal, my essay from WBUR's Cognoscenti site #cognoscenti #nepal

In 1997, I made a lightning work trip to Nepal (and three other nearby countries in 14 days) for UN Development Programme. I enjoyed my time in Thailand, Laos, and Pakistan, but it was Nepal that settled deep into my soul in barely four days. When the earthquake struck on April 25, I bounded from bed to my keyboard and banged out a 1500-word piece, almost without taking a break. As I did, the numbers of dead increased, then increased again. And again.

Then, cognizant of word-lengths for op-edish type pieces, I cut it down to 900 words and submitted it to Cognoscenti, WBUR's "Idea's and Opinions" site. They asked me to trim it by another 150 words, which I did, and it was published this morning. They added photos, one sad, illustrating the devastation in Kathmandu, the other a picture of precisely the World Heritage site that I wrote about taken two years ago, much as it was when I was there.

Here's the piece, "In Nepal, Getting Back to Normal in the Dust of Time." 

"Charting Culture"

The fad to chart massive amounts of data often leaves me (and others) shrugging. Cool pictures but...

This one is original -- charting the migration of well-known people from their births to their deaths, principally in the general Europe-to-North-America neighborhoods. I need to spend more time with it to understand what it's really telling us -- same same problem again -- meanwhile, this is very worth spending time with.

From YouTube description:

This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble. The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The team is based at the University of Texas at Dallas.

I'm not surprised to see that Barabasi is involved.

Here's the link (embed not working).

The branches of coincidence during the "anniversary"

Yesterday marked three years since Jeff died, which we spent together, indulging in massages, and eating his favorite meal.

"You're here because it's Dadpa's birthday," either Lake or Finn said when I arrived.

"It's not his birthday," the other said. "After you die, your birthday is called your anniversary."

It was so clever that it wasn't worth "correcting." Right. Forevermore, June 11 is Dadpa's anniversary.

A few hours later and quite out of the blue, I received an email from our neighbor Eleanor Rubin, an artist whose work we loved (we bought several pieces) and whom I only have seen occasionally over the years and not at all in the last three:

Hello, Jessica

It is impulsive of me to send a note and say hello.  I hope my note does not feel intrusive.  I think of you often and miss seeing you both.

Today, reading a book called " The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge," I came across an image of an "OrgScope by Jeffrey Stamp."  It made me remember a day, (must have been '11) when I met Jeffrey out walking his dog and he told me of his diagnosis.  I'm sure my response was inadequate but the moment is etched in my memory. I wished then as I wish now that I'd known how to respond fully.  Jeffrey seemed so much himself and yet I doubted that I'd ever see him again.  And I never did...

And then I remembered that about two years ago, I received a permission request from Manuel Lima, asking for permission to include a picture of OrgScope in this book on "visualizing branches of knowledge." And that I'd blogged one of Manuel's very clear talks here.

 

Explain to me why my neighbor wrote yesterday. Explain, please.

Leading ourselves via "the lattice"

June Holley, whose insights and methods for establishing and growing networks are in a class of their own, points today to Phanish Puranam's post on the INSEAD blog, "What Bossless Firms Can Teach Us."

Puranam's round-up of companies that have eschewed traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy for more intelligent self-management points to some popular and successful examples: Valve, the Seattle software company where employees vote with their seats for projects they want to work on (no votes, no project); the California tomato processor, Morning Star, that, as Puranam writes "bases its organisation on a sort of mission statement that is negotiated peer-to-peer rather than imposed by a boss, laying out each employee’s tasks and organisational affiliations;" and, the grandparent of them all, W.L. Gore and Associates, which I mentioned here.

 

We (Jeff Stamps and I) stumbled upon W.L. Gore when we were doing research for The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book. Given all the hoopla about self-governance and jettisoning old authoritarian structures, I'm offering this excerpt which details how Gore has done it all these years. It's simple, sensible, and worth a try, C-Suiters. Good sense can prevail when the agreements, policies, and governance are in place throughout an organization, top-to-bottom. Gore's approach reflects both good organizational design, mutual respect, and a mature approach to how people come to work.

Take a look and see if this makes sense to you, noting Bill Gore's realistic caveats, typically overlooked in the idealistic vision of "leaderless" organizations espoused by people who haven't carefully considered what it takes to make people-working-together work.

From The TeamNet Factor, Chapter 4:

Meet the Lattice: The Free Form Organization That Makes Gore-Tex

Gore-Tex is" a miracle weave in the fabric of the world’s outdoor life." It evaporates sweat while protecting its wearer from the drench of rain. Gore-Tex is a visible, distinctive partner with producers of ski gloves, tents, and clothing of all descriptions. Like Dolby sound, Gore-Tex is known for the special contribution it makes to a wide range of products.

If ever there were a company whose product mirrored its culture, it is W L. Gore & Associates. This lattice textile is made by a lattice organization, a company designed for horizontal interactions where employees are known as “associates.”

In 1982, Inc. magazine runs a cover story on the Newark, Delaware, company best known for its popular product Gore-Tex. Headlined “The Un-manager: Without Ranks and Titles,” the story describes Bill Gore’s “not your average” almost-billion- dollar company. By 1991, the company is among the “400 largest private U.S. Companies.”2

The name “W. L. Gore & Associates” captures the essence of this remarkable enterprise. The design of the company is that of a network. Its core glue is the philosophy of its husband-and-wife founders, Wilbert (“Bill”), who died in 1986, and Genevieve, who remains involved in the company. Business Week features their son Robert in 1990 in an article titled “No Bosses. And Even Leaders Can’t Give Orders.”

The 1982 Inc. story so excites us that we call its author, Lucien Rhodes, who in turn forwards us a poorly typed document with a few handwritten notes on it that Bill Gore has sent him. “The Lattice Organization—A Philosophy of Enterprise” describes the Gore “bureaucracy”:

People group around projects undertaken on the basis of commitment.

The firm’s 5,600 associates (not employees)—now in 46 plants in six countries— have sponsors (not bosses), who serve as their mentors and advocates.

Gore’s projects are boundary crossing teams. “The mathematician, engineer, accountant, machinist, chemist and so on provide a combination of capabilities of a much broader scope than the mere sum of their number. This synergism . . . impels us to join together for mutual benefit.”

STUMP SPEECH TO THE TRIBES

Bill Gore’s paper, written in 1976, was the basis for many talks that he gave over the years to the company’s associates.4 (Which brings us back to the name: everyone who works at W. L. Gore & Associates is an associate.)

It’s not your typical corporate speech. With his ponderous, sometimes mystical tone, Gore sounds more like a 19th-century transcendentalist than the late-2Oth- century entrepreneur that he is. He begins with the “Nature of Man,” the starting point, usually unstated, of every corporate culture. One part of our heritage, he says, comes from hunters and predators with the urge to attack, destroy, loot, vanquish, and overcome competitors. Fortunately, humans evolved new social capabilities that carried the species far beyond this endowment. ‘A further great evolutionary invention is the cooperation of groups made possible by friendship and love.... The tribal group ... combines aggressive capability welded together by emotional interactions.” To Gore, the essence of human nature is co-opetition.

Besides being capable of friendship and love, he says, people are also dreamers. He asks what would happen if people doubled their brain capacity. “If the norm in our society is the utilization of say 10% of our inherent human capabilities, what would be the result if we were able to restructure . . . this to double to 20%?”

People participate in groups because together they can accomplish more than alone, he says. Gore believes accomplishment peaks with about 150 people in the same group. After that, results decline, and it’s time to form another group, a principle that the company puts into practice. Gore breaks plants apart when they exceed 150 to 200 people. This is, roughly, a tribal size, the upper-limit size of groups that people lived in after the invention of language but before the development of agriculture and cities.

When groups pass out of the realm in which everyone knows everyone else, Gore believes “we" quickly translates into “they.” This tiny language signal announces the beginning of turf wars, the identification of enemies, and win-lose maneuvers that eventually bring down even great companies.

THE LATTICE BEHIND THE FACADE

There’s another downside to groups of more than 150 to 200, Gore says. “Beyond some such level, it becomes necessary to impose rules, regulations, procedures and the like that dictate how the cooperation shall be done. Special teams evolve within the lattice structure usually led by someone particularly competent in the discipline or activity of the team. One individual may participate on several such teams and have a leadership role in them. These multi-participant people serve an important liaison function and are often involved ina number of different teams,” Gore says.

To avoid bureaucracy and to reach for that doubling of human capabilities, the company uses the lattice, which has these characteristics:

• No fixed or assigned authority;
• Sponsors, not bosses;
• Natural leadership defined by followership;
• Person-to-person communication;
• Objectives set by those who must make them happen; and
• Tasks and functions organized through commitments.

Leadership “evolves” at the company, according to Daniel D. Johnson, who eventually followed in his former co-worker’s footsteps, leaving Du Pont to join Gore. “You look behind you, and you’ve got people following you.”

In Gore’s view, “Every [successful] organization has a lattice organization that underlies the facade of authoritarian hierarchy. It is through these lattice organizations that things get done. Most of us delight in ‘going around’ the formal procedures and doing things the straightforward and easy way. The legendary subversion of official military procedures by the ‘non-coins’ is an example of this. All astute military leaders utilize this sub rosa lattice.”

For all his unusual ideas, Gore is not a romantic. He doesn’t propose replacing every aspect of hierarchy with lattices because of what he calls obvious difficulties:

• “Stability and long-term constancy require a firm hand at the helm;
• “Decisions must be made. Complete consensus is never achieved;
• “There seems to be some upper limit for which the lattice is effective; and
• “It’s unrealistic for people to set their own salaries."

VOW TO AVOID BUREAUCRACY

“The rest of Corporate America is only beginning to think about how to motivate employees now that there’s a shrinking hierarchy to slot people into,” Joseph Weber says in the 1990 Business Week article. “But Gore, a quirky, family-held plastics company, has never had much of one: It has been experimenting with an almost free-form management structure for 32 years.... Gore isn’t some little countercultural outfit, mind you. By turning a flexible form of DuPont’s Teflon into Gore-Tex, used in fabrics and assorted medical, electronic, and industrial products, the company has grown into a nearly $700 million a year outfit, whose return on assets and equity puts it in the top 5%, whose sales quintupled in 8 years.”

As irony would have it, of course, Gore started his own company because “as a DuPont chemist, he couldn’t get his innovation—Teflon coating for electrical wires—marketed by the big company. When he left, he vowed to avoid stifling bureaucracies, so he tossed out the traditional chain of command for a ‘lattice’ system. In it, any staffer may take an idea or complaint to any other: A machine operator can talk directly with plant leaders.”

In his lattice organization paper, Gore gives DuPont credit for inspiring his “ahead of the time” ideas. “The concept of the lattice originated from my consideration of the operation of ‘Task Forces’ created during the 1950s to carry out research and development within the Du Pont Company. The original ideas have been refined and extended over the past 18 years. The record supports the belief that a lattice organization releases and promotes the creativity of human beings.”

Task forces at DuPont and lattices at Gore are just two expressions of the worldwide, simultaneous, uncoordinated “experiment” with boundary crossing teamnets in the past few decades. 

 

 

A blast into network space with Christakis

This starts with a Facebook post that's been making the rounds, the one about Stephen Wolfram's new work with a catchy headline that may or may not describe what Wolfram is talking about: "Sentient code: An inside look at Stephen Wolfram’s utterly new, insanely ambitious computational paradigm."

I've read the article three times, discussed it with a computer scientist, and am still not clear on exactly what Wolfram is proposing, though we all run into the problem he's trying to solve (not specifically, i.e. I don't really need to know where the International Space Station is right now but...):

Wolfram wants to make the world computable, so that our computers can answer questions like “where is the International Space Station right now.” That requires a level of machine intelligence that knows what the ISS is, that it’s in space, that it is orbiting the Earth, what its speed is, and where in its orbit it is right now.

I do want to find real answers to my search questions and if Wolfram's on the path, let's go. 

Last night, I noticed  a rather long stream of thoughtful comments about the Wolfram piece, replying to my friend Doug Lea's Facebook query, "To ask David Letterman's question, "Is this something, or is it nothing?". People weighed in with serious commentary, one seemingly knowledgeable person after another, speculating/rendering opinions about whether what Wolfram is proposing makes sense. (My local computer scientist, by the way, tells me it does.)

In addition to the actual comments, what stood out to me was that thoughtful conversation was actually transpiring, a refreshing break from the bitter political acrimony that has caused friends to actually quit Facebook from time to time and the well-meaning attaboy/girls that I, for one, am guilty of participating in constantly on Facebook (Yay, you! How beautiful/sweet/cute!). One daughter of mine calls it Bragbook for good reason.

So I posted a comment to that effect on Doug's page, remarking that the discussion reminded me of the early days on EIES, back when there were only a few hundred thousand/million people online around the world anyway and when we still had no idea that we could order leggings after our discussions on whether computers would someday be in everyone's "electronic cottages."

And, I said something about Wolfram's new work, noting that he never used the word "network" in the article, which I mentioned to the local computer scientist who explained that while he may not have used the word explicitly, he believed that if asked Wolfram would agree that there were network properties inherent in his work.

This caused Doug to ask me to take a look at this talk by Dr. Nicholas Christakis at a recent Edge conference. OK. Once again, I'm out of it. Apparently, Edge has been going on for 15 years, thanks to John Brockman, whose name I know from the olden days of publishing, i.e. Brockman's agency put a lot of popular scientists/good writers on the map, and he himself has written some interesting books. Christakis's topic at HeadCon 13, "The Science of Social Connections," is definitely worth the 30 minutes (not 3, 30) if you're at all interested in networks.

I am. I've been working on networks since 1979, writing about them, developing ideas for nearly all that time with Jeff Stamps, who first alerted me to Christakis's work. Shortly thereafter, Jeff and I were invited to speak at the International Conference on Complex Systems, where Christakis also was speaking and which I touched on in this post.

In Christakis's Edge talk (the videography is gorgeous), he sweeps the field, dropping ah-has by the minute, including his near-opener, that links--the connections among us--are as important, no, he says more important, than the nodes--the people. Zinger. I wish the whole talk had been about this but then again everything in it is so interesting that I'll give a pass. He notes that the network structures of pre-agricultural-age people (there's still a little tribe of them numbering 1000 who sleep under the stars and aren't on Facebook--yet), are identical to ours; that contagion spreads differently depending on network structure; and that other species have similar networks. Lots of stuff. Love it.

Where I see another "edge" is taking all the deep work and popular fascination with social networks and merging it with organizational networks, the structures that we work in, go to school in, vote in, yes, the same ones that make us want to throw shoes at the screen. How are our organizational structures influenced by the findings of social networks and how can we use those findings to create more humane/human organizations? Org charts have looked the same since the days of the railroads and the industrial-era behemoths that were erected to manage them. We've learned so so much. It's time to integrate the worlds. Dr. Christakis?

 

PS to The Edge crowd: The Monty Python-esque guy carrying around the bike wheel who appears from time to time in Christakis's video? Schtick? Send the guy the rest of the bike? 

 

 

"Branded" by (J. Gordon) Lippincott: How NetAge Got Its Logo

I get Mediabistro's daily blast, one of the few email lists that I actually read (relatively) regularly. It's a good way to keep up with industry developments and gossip. Today, the name Lippincott lept out and so I clicked over to UnBeige and found "What Is a Brand?" (below) from the iconic branding company itself. Honestly, I'm not that interested in branding. Maybe if it didn't show up in every other sentence, I might be more forgiving but like the word curation it's now so overused that it is hardly worth saying. That said (ahem), the Lippincott use is warranted and the video is worth the watch.

My silly snarks aside, we owe an abiding debt to Gordon Lippincott, founder of Lippincott & Margulies, now just Lippincott, and now part of the mega-conglom Marsh & McLennan.

Back in the days when the mail, the kind that came with postage (in this case, 1983), was worth waiting for, an unexpected letter arrived with the return address of J. Gordon Lippincott. I'd never heard of him but inside was a letter with some drawings and a xeroxed sheet.

The letter, which I have in storage somewhere, went roughly like this:

I read your newsletter [at the time we published "Networking Newsletter" and "Networking Journal'] and was interested in what you're doing. I've spent my career developing corporate logos so I spent some time playing around with some ideas for you. They're on the next page. Feel free to use them however you want. I'm also enclosing a page with some of the logos I've designed.

On that humbly introduced sheet were "some of the logos" he'd designed including Betty Crocker, General Mills, Chrysler, and FTD.

And NetAge as in see above. (Details, details: Actually, it was our company Networking Institute that received the logo but as part of the founding of NetAge in 1998, we passed along the logo because of its clear relevance to The Age of the Network, the book that ultimately inspired the founding of the new company.)

We loved it. He said that we could use it in portions (he supplied some examples) or in its entirety but that we should never print over it, a rule that we have mostly followed over the years.

It's interesting to note that many other companies now use logos similar to NetAge's. Some use similar lines. Some use portions of a similar design. But to the best of my knowledge, ours was the first and ours was the only designed by the man who invented the term "corporate identity," Gordon Lippincott.

Gordon died in 1998. His obit is worth the read. And here's Lippincott's new (and quite good) video on branding, a word it of all companies, deserves to use.

 

 

Uh-oh: Don't catch divorce

From the department of everything's related to everything and the seemingly endless findings stemming from the Framingham Heart Study, here's yet another research study proving that networks carry a lot of strange viruses. According to the study, you're much more likely to divorce if a friend divorces (75% more likely) and somewhat more likely (33%) if a friend of a friend divorces.

I'm not making this up. See this article by Rick Morin on the Pew Center site.

Here's the graphic from a new study by Brown University's Rose McDermott and stalwart network-contagion researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. Its title tells the story: "Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else Is Doing It Too: Social Network Effects of Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample."

I draw two conclusions from this: one, get rid of all your friends; and two, don't live in Framingham, which is where many of these studies have been done. You might have a heart attack, smoke, gain weight, and, now get divorced.

(No, no...I greatly admire Christakis et al. Terrific insights into the "stremgth of all ties" -- I just made that up.)

Lindy Hess changed our lives and those of so many others

It was 3 AM and I woke, cold, which, given the heat of the past weeks, seemed impossible. None of my tricks for getting back to sleep were working so I engaged in the one activity that we now know is the worst, reading on a screen where, as usual, I went straight to the obits. There Katie Hafner's extremely sad one about Lindy Hess, who ran the Columbia Publishing Course.

Photo by Lilian Kemp swiped from NYT obit and how Lindy looked when we met her (thanks)

We met Lindy in 1981 on the very day Reagan was being sworn in as president and the hostages were released in Iran. About nine months earlier, Jeff Stamps and I had sold Networking, our first joint book to Methuen, the British publisher, which was starting up an American list (for the publishing historians, Fred Jordan, for many years of Grove Press, was the publisher of this effort). The sale was thanks to Ron Bernstein, our agent at the time. But not long after we'd signed the contract, Ron called to say that Methuen's parent company in the UK had decided to cancel its plans to publish an American list. He was reassuring that he could sell the book again, which he did in very short order at a bit more than twice the original advance to...

Lindy Hess at Doubleday. It was a good break for people bringing out their first book with a major publisher. Lindy knew what she was doing. At 31, she was such a pro that the venerated old house had given her control of an imprint (Doubleday Dolphin). Because she appeared to be so knowledgeable and clearly was very talented and because we'd done the deal on the phone without meeting face-to-face, I thought she'd be much older than I. Instead, when we went to the swanky building on, was it Park Avenue, we were greeted by a woman three years younger with shoulder-length hair held back by a, was it velvet, headband that she removed and reinserted every few minutes. We talked in her office for a while about what was ahead in the process, mentioned that "Jackie Onassis" was now an editor at Doubleday, described her as "very nice" and "hard-working," and shortly thereafter asked if I needed to use the ladies room.

We went together and, as we stood in front of the mirror fidgeting with our hair after peeing -- isn't that part of the ritual: pee, wash your hands, fuss with your hair? -- she said I looked "elegant." I was wearing a long-sleeved ivory silk blouse with a self-tie that I'd borrowed from my friend-neighbor Emily, a dark-blue, knee-length wool skirt with two unusual pleats and one pocket that was stitched not quite right (I'd gotten it at a designer-discount shop) causing me to fuss with *it* constantly, and the most expensive pair of tall boots I'd ever bought, then about five years old. It felt like quite a compliment standing with "my editor" in Manhattan.

Things went well. Lindy liked the book and, when we made a most unusual proposal, she was game, a story I told here about four years ago. We were, how do you say, computer-savvy early on and thus had the ability to write, edit, and create the files for typesetting the book electronically. Doubleday had never done this but Lindy's response was enthusiastic. She inquired around to make sure it would work; she got a positive response; and she gave us a second contract for the typesetting, which, by today's standards, was a GIANT KLUDGE. We wrote the book on a Wang 2200, whose files were then converted by Typesetting Service in Providence, RI, that had a Digital PDP-11 and which could then output and paste-up pages in the format and design that Doubleday specified. It was the first time Doubleday had ever done a book this way and it worked. (The only thing that went wrong was that the FedEx truck delivering the final paste-ups had an accident on the West Side Drive in NY!)

Shortly after the book was published (my memory is that it was only weeks), Lindy left Doubleday and, if I've got this right, moved to Boston, and not long thereafter married her husband Bill Appleton. I was happy for her and sad that our acquisition editor had orphaned our book. A very nice guy took over -- Gerry Helferich -- who later went on to work at Wiley (a later publisher of Jeff's and my books) and who now writes his own books.

We saw Lindy a few times after she moved to Boston, us visting her house, she visting ours, but as time went on, we lost touch. Then about five years ago, David Miller of Garamond Agency, a new agent whom we worked with for a while, told us he was going to teach at the Columbia Publishing Course, which led to a discussion of the program and, alas, that's where Lindy had ended up, spending 25 years making that program and many of its graduates extremely successful.

Once you've been published, you can never be unpublished. There have been other people who have come along in the years since Lindy published Networking, people whose work has made a very big difference in Jeff's and my writing careers but Lindy was the first book publisher and I'd give anything at this moment to see her take that headband out and put it back in.

 

 

 

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.

 

"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.