Around the Corner

A few weeks ago, in my review of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, I contrasted hierarchical command structures with biological systems that are networks of cooperation. In Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, examines how the World Wide Web provides the ideal infrastructure for networks of cooperation in today’s global information society.

Those of you who are following the Management Innovators Bookshelf series may have noticed that I skipped ahead to #7 on Gary Hamel’s essential reading list. I think you’ll agree the complementarity between Out of Control and Small Pieces justifies my choice. I’ll return to Hamel’s #3, the Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner later in the series.

Like a reflection in a mirror, Web infrastructure is ideal because it takes the same shape as the networks of cooperation that use it. Both the Web infrastructure and these networks of cooperation self-organize. And if we drew a picture of self organizing systems, whether physical or biological, they would have surprisingly similar shapes. Although we might assume they're random, they are very efficiently organized in a shape called scale-free. And they both look like Figure 1.

Figure 1

Like Kelly, Weinberger is hopeful. As we read in the final chapter of the book, Weinberger writes “The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea. Ideas don’t explode, they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall sized television screens.” But Weinberger is also worried. He acknowledges disappointments like the dot-com bust, and he also recognizes that the Web can generate unrealistic expectations about the pace of change: “[…] answers can come quickly. The Web is indeed speeding up the pace by enabling ideas to be heard and discussed faster than ever before, but it takes more than a meme, or an idea virus to work through the implications of a change in bedrock concepts. It can take generations to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world.”

Weinberger writes that identity, space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge and matter all shape our experience on the web. And that experience defines a networked culture of cooperation whose collective behavior, like Kelly’s bee hive, is adaptive, distributed and organic. The group seems to possess a knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. While at the same time we preserve and even celebrate our individuality on the Web.

The Web is what we make it and we are what it makes us. The Web is a MirrorWorld. And Weinberger’s unified theory of the Web is a reflection of our culture in the Web.

We are Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

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Last year when I started Around the Corner I promised a place where we could challenge some of our assumptions, explore something new or discover something unknown. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly is the second in the list of Gary Hamel's essential reading for management innovators. It presents a wonderful opportunity to challenge, explore and discover.

Kelly, previously the founder and Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and member of the Board of the Long Now Foundation, imagines a world for us in which biological principles can help to enable human collaboration. For instance, the typical organizational structure is very hierarchical and top-down driven. But Kelly suggests a beehive model might be informative for our modern knowledge economy. The members of the beehive do not have formal roles and responsibilities, but each member makes a contribution. The beehive as a whole is adaptive, distributed, and organic. Likewise, a spider web is a useful model to describe the interrelated nature of suppliers, employees, customers, and stakeholders in today’s complex organizations. These and other systems in nature don’t generally follow a centralized hierarchy, but instead work through networks of cooperation. In some cases the group seems to possess a kind of knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. Consider migrating geese. None of the flock have made the trip before, yet somehow the flock knows its migration path from hemisphere to hemisphere

Another of Kelly’s key ideas is that complex systems work best when they grow incrementally: “The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization without growing it, inevitably lead to failure..... Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others...."

Out of Control is not a quick read, but it is a thoughtful book that challenges the reader to think about future possibilities. As technology professionals we know from what we experience every day that success requires careful attention to every detail and that progress is slow and most times really quite laborious. Possibilities are endless in Out of Control. It is worth the reading because we're too often led to exclude possibilities rather than wonder what's Around the Corner.

It's on my bookshelf and I hope you have the time to add it to yours!

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The Aspen Institute holds its annual Ideas Festival each summer. This year the festival was held from June 29 though July 5. The 2009 Festival theme was, “Ideas That Work,” and had four tracks: World Affairs and the Global Economy; Arts and Culture; Life in America; and Managing Planet Earth.

The Festival gathers recognizable leaders, thinkers and doers at the Institute to share their ideas. Traditional media outlets typically provide limited coverage of the Festival. This year my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, is running a special ideas report and recently the Festival started sharing ideas through a video library.

This year there's a twist. Because sharing ideas widely is as important as being at the Festival, the Institute is extending its reach by recruiting at least 140 attendees to share ideas from the Festival through Twitter. (The number 140 is relevant because Twitter updates are limited to no more than 140 characters.)

You can track and share open ideas from the Festival by searching Twitter, using the search term #AIF09. This search string is called a “hashtag,” denoted by the pound sign at the beginning. Prior to the Festival, organizers established this hashtag to give everyone a common reference point to track updates from the Festival on Twitter.

There are other ways to track ideas from the Festival too. Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, users abbreviate the ideas they share as memes. The term meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller the Selfish Gene. Memes are units of cultural information with specific meaning that are replicated throughout a culture. Memes can be abbreviations or terms whose interpretation requires tacit knowledge.

"Chimerica" is a good example of a meme used at the Festival. Chimerica was coined by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson to describe "China's strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America's debt habit." By simply searching Twitter on Chimerica, you’ll find Tweets from all the attendees that used that meme in a Tweet.

Twist provides a graphical view of Tweets containing a meme. Enter Chimerica in Twist and you will see a time series plot of Chimerica Tweets. Twist also displays the Chimerica Tweets in a list below the plot. Mouse over the plot and select a specific point in time to browse the Tweets.

Tweets are an excellent way to share ideas. Whether through hashtags established as a convention or by plotting the time series of memes, you can be part of the Aspen 140: Open Ideas Project.

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Thanks to everyone who helped plan and execute as well as those who attended this year's Management of Change Conference. I believe our experience together with Vivek Kundra, Clay Shirky, Rob Carey and Aneesh Chopra was truly transformative. And I hope those who were not able to attend will search Twitter on our hashtag #MOC to follow our tweet stream. Feel free to retweet or share your thoughts here.

Over the next few posts I'll share my thoughts on topics covered by the speakers. I'll start with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, whose role is to foster technology related economic development. If you haven't heard Aneesh, be sure to watch this video from January's State of the Net Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus. He's a truly inspiring speaker.

As GCN's Wyatt Kash describes here, Aneesh revealed his early plans on open standards, crowd sourcing, cyber security and government research and development. One of his key priorities is to identify “game-changing” innovations that improve government performance dramatically rather than incrementally. As an example, Aneesh referred to a recent partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia and NASA Langley to upgrade the Viriginia high school physics curriculum. The curriculum had not been updated in many years and topics such as nanotechnology were not adequately covered. Through an open, collaborative process, the group developed and launched the “21st Century Physics Flexbook,” in a matter of months rather than years as would normally be the case, and at almost no cost to taxpayers.

Aneesh also spoke extensively about the importance of the government's research and development mission. So, just some R&D background for my readers. In previous posts I mentioned the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology and Global Competitiveness reports. These reports show wide ranging outcomes from research and development policy. How a policy differentiates research from development, basic from applied research and private sector from public sector investment strongly affect Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation maintains, annually, a report called the Science and Engineering Indicators that provide insights into national and international trends in R&D. Although U.S. R&D spending has fallen to about 2.6% of GDP, the U.S. maintains a very competitive position in R&D. The U.S. spends more than any other nation on R&D and more than the entire G7 nations. A few other nations like Brazil, India and China are increasing R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Private sector investment is a very large percent of U.S. R&D funding, upwards of 70%. Private sector expenditures focus on development. About 60% of U.S. basic research is conducted is universities and most of that is Federally funded. U.S. R&D is geographically concentrated. Four states - California, Massachusetts, Texas and Illinois perform more than 70% of all computer and electronics R&D. The U. S. is the leading source of new patent inventions compared with Europe and Asia. Finally, multinational corporation's R&D expenditures outside their own country continue to rise. Overseas R&D by U.S. multinationals is shifting away from Europe to emerging Asian markets.

It's a very nice report, and I highly recommend it. However, as Aneesh pointed out, it is difficult to capture and measure the return on investment from R&D spending. He also mentioned the need to capture outcome metrics that help us understand the benefits accrued from R&D.

Welcome Aneesh Chopra and thanks again to all who participated in this year's Management of Change Conference!

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A little over three years ago the National Academies published Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The Gathering Storm report is the Academies' response to a request by Senators Lamar Alexander and Jeff Bingaman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to “conduct an assessment of America’s ability to compete and prosper in the 21st century – and to propose appropriate actions to enhance the likeliness of success in that endeavor.”

During this global economic crisis the Gathering Storm report seems even timelier than when it was written. The findings in the report come as no surprise: that America faces serious and intensifying challenges to its competitiveness as do Americans to our standard of living; that pervasive information and communication technologies (ICTs) have intensified competition for high paying jobs across national boundaries; and that knowledge and innovation are crucial to American competitiveness as well as each individual’s standard of living.

Since the Gathering Storm report was issued, the mortgage crisis impacted both employment and our standard of living in ways the Academies did not anticipate, yet the recommendations of the report remain all too relevant. Just last month before the House Appropiations Committee on Commerce, Justice and Science, Norman Augustine, Chair of the National Academies committee that produced the report, testified that “It is perhaps appropriate at this point to note why the Gathering Storm committee placed such great emphasis on science and engineering, including the endeavors of research and education. The reason is that while scientists and engineers comprise only four percent of the nation’s workforce, they disproportionately create jobs for the other 96 percent … and jobs for all citizens is what the Academies report was really about. Numerous other studies have shown that over the last half century between 50 and 85 percent of the growth in Gross Domestic Product is attributable to advancement in science and engineering. In the current century, the Knowledge Century, this effect is likely to be even more prominent.”

The World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report (GITR) provides a framework to understand how 134 nations comprising 98% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are prepared to emerge from the global economic crisis. This framework called the Network Readiness Framework (NRF) measures the extent to which economies benefit from the latest ICT advances where benefit means each nation’s competitive position ranked according to an associated Network Readiness Index (NRI). The NRI includes weighting for many factors mentioned in the Gathering Storm report and although the GITR focuses only on ICTs it serves as a useful companion to the Gathering Storm report. Most importantly, Figure 1 demonstrates a high correlation between the NRI score and Per Capita GDP providing solid evidence of Mr. Augustine’s claim that growth in GDP is attributable to science and technology.

So how competitive is the U.S. three years after the Gathering Storm report according to the NRI? We rank at #3 overall, up one place from last year and four places the year before. Again it’s no surprise that countries ranked high in the World Bank knowledge economy index also rank high in GITR, with Denmark once again ranked #1 and European nations taking 7 of the top ten spots. Our strengths are in venture capital availability (#1), quality of scientific research institutions (#1), and business internet use (#1), and e-government participation (#1). By contrast we score low in the following criteria: effectiveness of law making bodies (#33), property rights (#26), quality of math and science education (#48), government prioritization of ICT (#18), importance of ICT to government vision of the future (#28), government success in ICT promotion (#21), ICT use and government efficiency (#18), and presence of ICT in government offices (#16).

So the GITR has some good news as well as a useful comparative analysis supporting our future planning. I hope you'll take the time to read either the report highlights or browse the interactive version.

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As I mentioned in my recent post called The Language of Innovation, Gary Hamel is onto something truly vital with his work on Moonshots for Management. Inspired by the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Engineering Challenges and the work of the X-Prize Foundation, Hamel and a group of the world’s most recognizable innovators spent two days together last May defining twenty-five make or break challenges for the future of management in the 21st century. Why define these make or break challenges? As Hamel explains, many of today’s management techniques originated in the late 19th century with one specific purpose: train semi-skilled human resources to repeat manual tasks at ever increasing levels of efficiency. Simply put, these management techniques are ill suited to today's organizations which operate not in an industrial, but in a knowledge economy.

So what’s a knowledge economy and why is it important to management techniques? The term knowledge economy was introduced into the mainstream by Peter Drucker in his 1966 book The Effective Executive to differentiate an economy where organizations profit by the labor of employees who worked with their heads, not their hands. Since its introduction the idea of a knowledge economy has become widely accepted. Today the World Bank ranks nations annually in its Knowledge Economy Index according to the four pillars of its Knowledge Assessment Methodology: economic incentive and institutional regime; education and training; innovation and technological adoption; and information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure. As one might suspect, in 2008, eight years after adoption of the Lisbon Strategy, European countries dominated the knowledge index ranking with Denmark at the top. The U.S. currently ranks number 9.

Lawyers, doctors, software engineers, teachers, scientists and public servants are all considered knowledge workers. The twenty-five moonshots Hamel and his colleagues defined speak volumes about how to manage knowledge workers so they can be most effective. Moonshot #2, Fully Embed the Ideas of Community and Citizenship in Management Systems, makes a lot of sense to me. As we all know too well, knowledge is a precious commodity and as professionals we all need and learn from each other. It seems today that things change so rapidly it takes an entire community to master a discipline. As do moonshots #6, Reinvent the Means of Control and #7, Redefine the Work of Leadership. When managing knowledge workers we must transcend the dichotomy between discipline and innovation as mutually exclusive opposites. And if it takes an entire community to master a discipline, leaders must evolve into social-systems architects who enable collaboration and innovation rather than constrain decisions. Moonshot #5, Reduce Fear and Increase Trust as well as #8, Expand and Exploit Diversity, strengthen both the culture and the effectiveness of an organization. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, describes in this conference video how the effectiveness of the Google organization is embedded within its culture. Finally Moonshot #15, Create a Democracy of Information, articulates a very optimistic view of how information technology can empower us all to act on behalf of the entire organization.

These are just a few of my favorites. Please let me know yours. I hope you enjoy challenges as I do. Whether you’re a knowledge worker, a leader or a manager these Moonshots are our challenges together.

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Today, much of our work is done in groups. Whether on a Federal committee, on a project team in support of Agency mission or at home serving our communities, much of what we do is through participation in groups. What makes a group successful (or not)?

Thanks to Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft Research for the wonderful reference to Joseph McGrath's Time, Interaction and Performance (TIP): A Theory of Groups. Prior to 1991, behavioral research focused on controlled studies of small groups in well defined experiments. Experiments accurately measured a group's ability to produce results, known as its production function. Experiments typically included solving single task problems. The researcher supplied the complete set of resources required to solve the problem and group members were kept in isolation during the experiment. Needless to say, this approach of measuring how groups produce the best output is a very Industrial Age approach, in the same vein as the famous time and motion studies conducted by the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Today, thanks to McGrath’s research, we know that group success is about much more than widget output. Factors such as the overall well-being of the group and support for members in that group are critical for a group’s success in the real world over a period of time. Group well being describes the activities of the development and maintenance of the group as a whole and the relationships among members. Member support describes the ways in which the individual is embedded within the group and the relationship between the individual and the group as a whole. These two functions encapsulate the nature of interaction in McGrath's Theory. To gauge the effect of time, McGrath studied the effect on group functions when groups are embedded in society and groups whose members change.

All too often the groups in which we work focus exclusively on the production function with little regard to group well being and member support. But I believe that emphasizing group well being and member support leads to better outcomes. This is especially true as our groups become more geographically dispersed and we have less day to day contact. Professor Steve Kelman of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, in his post entitled Collaboration success - The Facebook model redux cites a study in which what Kelman calls personalized groups were 18% more successful than depersonalized groups in achieving settlement in a negotiation. Kelman's personalized groups are composed of negotiators who had pictures and biographies of their negotiating partners and were able to exchange emails prior to starting their negotiation.

McGrath's group well being is most likely at work in personalized groups. Because members were able to personalize relationships through pictures and biographies, group production increased significantly. Kelman's post on personalized groups doesn't speak to member support, but I think there are many stories out there to be told about member support. Do you have a story to tell about your role in a group? It could be a success, or how the group could have done better with more member support. Where do you see the role of leadership in member support?

What about group well being? Have social media, or collaboration tools changed group well being in your groups?

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I've been following the use of technology in social entrepreneurship for the past few years. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem then organizes, operates and assumes risk, as in a business, to create social change. The goal is to utilize market forces to achieve some social good. Technology leaders like Pierre Omidyar of eBay are very active in social entrepreneurship. Of course not everyone has the capital of the Omidyar Foundation, but everyone can make a difference and technology allows us to make a big difference together.

I recently learned about Free Rice. Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice to hungry people around the world through the UN World Food Program for every word you get right in an online word matching quiz. In 2008 the combined efforts of all players donated 43,942,622,700 grains of rice. At 50,000 grains per 1kg bag, that's about 878,852 bags of rice.

So how was so much rice donated in 2008? Answer: The network effect. Social media utilities like Facebook allow us to make a big difference together through our social networks. Yes, it's on Facebook too. Imagine if every time your friends log into Facebook, they answer ten questions and their friends answer ten questions, and so on. If your social network, like the internet, is scale free, and you have lots of friends, then you have the ability to help fill a lot of bags.

So if you love challenges, especially word games, in addition to doing some good you can have fun and keep your vocabulary sharp.

Play, Learn and Do Good !

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Like many of you I was fascinated by the stifling innovation video. Did you know that video was filmed by the Barriers Analysis team at NASA's Johnson Space Center? The characters in the video act out familiar mindsets, assumptions and processes that all too often put up roadblocks to innovation and inclusion. Justin Kugler tells the story of the video on the Open>NASA blog in his post called Pathways Beyond the Barriers. Kudos to NASA for being transparent about their efforts to change the culture of bureaucracy!

You'll read words in Justin's post from the language of innovation: inclusion, acceptance, spark, learning, building, investigating, fostering, people, trust, optimism, openness. Innovation is an attribute of an organization's culture and the words used by that culture speak to how and whether innovation is nurtured within the organization.

The characters in the film had to make a series of judgments. It's no easy task to make these judgments, but they are grounded in our values. Our values are the foundation of our culture and they are revealed through the language we use every day.

There is some interesting research emerging on how the values of innovation can improve management and organizational performance. Last month I attended the Gartner Symposium and heard a luncheon address from Gary Hamel of the London Business School. The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine have both named Hamel one of the world’s leading management experts . I was fascinated by what he had to say. His point was that today’s management techniques and organizational models were developed for the Industrial Age, mostly by men born in the mid-1800’s. Industrial-era management is ill-suited for today’s knowledge economy, and we need new thinking. I will blog more about this in a later post, because I really think Hamel is onto something vital, but you can read more in his latest article for Harvard Business Review, “Moon Shots for Management.” Here he suggests a set of 25 ambitious goals for 21st-century management to “shoot for,” including:

- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems

- Reduce fear and increase trust

- Create a democracy of information

I think the challenge for the public sector will be evolving management systems in a manner that recognizes our unique obligations to the public trust and sound use of tax dollars. There are many hopeful examples, however, including NASA’s. Another example of innovative management thinking is GSA’s support for my starting this blog. It took the work of numerous organizations, including legal, communications, IT, and my supervisory chain, to get it going. Yet no one ever said it couldn’t be done. Indeed, everyone had the perspective that this is a good thing and let’s see it done properly. And for that, I am very appreciative.

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Have you ever wondered where great ideas come from, or whether there are some great ideas out there that you just haven't heard yet ? Well, the annual Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference is a hot-bed for those ideas. And this year it's being held from February 4 through February 8 in Palm Springs.

TED started in 1984. Back then its goal was to bring together leading thinkers and doers from the diverse fields of technology, entertainment and design so they can share their best ideas. Since then TED expanded its scope to include world leaders, scientists, musicians and more. And these thinkers, doers and leaders have agreed to share their best ideas with you for free. You'll find videos from people you'll recognize like Al Gore who spoke last March on the pace of climate change. Here's a talk by Tony Robbins on why we do what we do and how we can do it better. Bill Gates just gave a talk on philanthropy and education that hasn't been posted yet. But you'll also find videos with fascinating ideas from people who you may not know.

The theme for the 2009 conference is "The Great Unveiling." Ethan Zuckerman from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is live blogging from the floor of the conference.

Enjoy!

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The global financial crisis overshadowed today's sessions at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum is an international non-profit organization that is committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas. It holds an annual meeting at this time each year and 2009 is its thirty-eighth year of international leadership. In addition to the global economic crisis, other topics for this year's meeting include energy, climate, governance, poverty and education.

Technology plays an especially relevant role at the World Economic Forum this year. In addition to the now-mainstream webcast and podcast information delivery channels, this year social media utilities allow us all to better engage, debate and attend. It may come as a surprise that we can be part of such a remote conference, but through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube we can do just that, at least virtually.

Citizen journalism is very active through Youtube and MySpace Citizen Reporter channels. The World Economic Forum sponsors an open group on Facebook with over 2,100 members. You'll also find chat sessions and a Youtube channel. And for the most current updates, follow the Davos tweets on Twitter.

The World Economic Forum continues throughout the next four days. I hope you will have the opportunity to engage, debate and attend. Enjoy !

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