Endless Knots

Some history of how we got here

Chandler Harrison ("Harry") Stevens is a name familiar to many who began their online lives back in the 1970s. The inventor of Participate, possibly the best of the computer conferencing systems ever developed (referenced here by Howard Rheingold in his book, Virtual Community), Stevens sent around a chapter of the memoir he's writing to friends last week. It's got so much good history - and so many familiar names - that I asked Harry if I could post it here. Enjoy this stroll down memory lane:

Today in 2008, blogs -- a word derived from "weblogs" on the Internet's World Wide Web -- support many-to-many communication within vast social networks such as Facebook, etc.

A decade ago in 1998, we completed developing a Web front-end and an Internet back-end for Participate, our then two-decades-old computer conferencing software, which went on to be used in Ukraine while I was in the Peace Corps (1999-2001; see http://co.net/). In 1993-1998, Participate had been used in developing CoNet community and NetCo educational networks -- funded by $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the US Department of Agriculture -- grants made to our CoNet Consortium, which consisted of the Austin Minnesota School System, Riverland Community College, University of Minnesota's Hormel Institute, and KSMQ Public Television. At that time, Participate was also being used by the largest distance learning organization, Phoenix University, among others, as licensed by Eventures Ltd.

Two decades ago in 1988, the World Wide Web did not yet exist, but in that year in Moscow I used a laptop computer to help prove that glasnost (meaning openness) was really happening. My impressions of the Soviet Union were typed into "USSR today"-- a blog-like branching topic within Participate, the most popular feature on The Source and CompuServe, forerunners to the Internet. My words typed in Moscow were seen worldwide instantaneously.

 

How penguins do what they do

Ken Thompson of Bioteams has a wonderful piece, "Why penguins have no commanding officer," that builds on his long exploration of teams in nature. In this one, he talks about the collective smarts of animal groups. There's no single leader; collectively, the group leads as each member knows some bit of the whole. Makes great sense to me - and jibes with our line about virtual teams and networks: "Leadership shifts depending on the task at hand," called "polycephalous leadership" by anthropologists Gerlach and Hine. See also Ken's post today, "Did ants invent the perfect mobile communications system?"

Ants interact using a system known as pheromones, involving sending 'chemical messages' to their community through smell and taste. It is also one of the oldest and most sophisticated forms of group communication on the planet with many features today's mobile and virtual teams would die for!

The invisible planet

A little bit of crowing (again). About twenty years ago, an editor at Routledge & Kegan Paul, the British publisher, asked if we'd consider doing a more "global" version of our book, Networking, which had come out a few years earlier. We agreed and, in the process of the revision, we changed the theme of the book from "Another America," where we examined non-institutional networks working on a variety of issues principally in the US to "the Invisible Planet," which extended the same idea to the multinational setting. Eventually, this book was published in the US by Viking Penguin as The Networking Book and translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil for the 1992 Earth Summit. Last week, I received this nice note from a reader who'd found me on LinkedIn. It's affirming to know that work done so many years ago still reaches people. Thanks, VA, for this lovely note - and what a great idea to republish this book as an eBook. Let me add that to the list.

Hello Jessica,

First thank you for adding me into your network. It is an honor to connect with one of the leading pioneers (oxy-moron?) of the networking universe.

I am back into reading a classic book once again, The Networking Book...I wish that it can be reprinted or offered as an Ebook, so people don't take the Networking tools available today, like Linkedin for granted.

The evolution is more than astonishing..and you have clearly displayed through your words in this valuable book. While many lines in the book resonate with me, one hit the core and you expressed so eloquently: 'There is nothing to conquer on the Invisible Planet: there are only problems to solve, using personal resourcefulness as the provider of solutions...'

I just wanted to share that with you..for it confirms my path and the  venture that I am so vehemently involved.

Continue with your pioneering or lead the way. Looking forward to connecting with you at the levels necessary to elevate the Invisible Planet where it needs to be.

Respectfully,
...

Geek Doctor on OrgScope

Pleased to report that John Halamka over at GeekDoctor posts today about our OrgScope in his Cool Technology of the Week series:

Understanding the six degrees of separation of healthcare in Eastern Massachusetts can be challenging with our numerous providers, private payers, public payers, and academic affiliations...

I found this hyperbolic viewer [OrgScope] much easier than an org chart for navigating a large number of complex relationships and look forward to the potential uses of this technology for visualizing our increasing connectedness in healthcare...

Over the past few months here at NetAge, we've taken a stab at mapping the relationships among the complex players in the Boston Healthcare network. Spaghetti, for sure, but since all of us here in Boston must somehow navigate that bowl of pasta, we're hopeful that these initial maps will contribute to making it easier for those working in healthcare here and for those of us consuming it. Thanks, Geek Doctor.

If you click through, you can play with the maps. This is but one picture. You can move it around, putting different institutions at the center, turn links on and off, and run analyses in a variety of ways. There's also an inside look at the organization chart of a fictitious large enterprise and Boston-Area Healthcare Network, a presentation that explains what we're up to with this stuff. Have fun with it and let me know what you think.

A passing of quality

Heaven must be running very well these days.

For those of us who started reading management books back in the '70s (true), we learned a few names quickly: Deming, Drucker, Juran. All three lived very long lives, Mr. Juran's the longest. He died on Friday at 103, leaving his wife of 81 years, Sadie. Together, these three defined  the way we think about organizations, what they do, why they do it, and how they accomplish their goals.

Each time we use the word quality, mention defects, allude to Six Sigma, or most familiarly, talk about the 80/20 rule, we're drawing on Mr. Juran's work. His thinking about cross-functional management has had a big impact on our work. We wrote about these ideas extensively during the '90s.

I wasn't blogging when Peter Drucker died in 2005 (Mr. Deming died just after Tim Berners-Lee gifted the world with the web). Had I been, that would have been a very long post as he was the only one of the three whom I knew. That the last of the three pioneers has died is some kind of marker and perhaps a call to discover the new breakthrough organizational thinkers among us. Some quiet voice inside is whispering that they're not to be found only in the business schools or in the commercial world, perhaps not even writing business books.

Green teams begin the year

Bill Ives, again, captures the heart of what I tried to say in Carbon neutral teams (below) in his New Year's post, Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008? This phrase, "green teams," has been running through my mind since I first posted. Think we should write a book about it? (Googling reveals that lots of folks are using the expression.)

Dorothy, it's knowledgement management

The Leavenworth (Kansas and, yes, I wore my red shoes) Times carried Conference focuses on knowledge management last Friday, an article on the event where we spoke in early November:

Speakers included the husband and wife team of Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, co-founders of a company called NetAge.

Part of their presentation focused on virtual teams, which Lipnack said are small groups of people working independently across boundaries.

Stamps and Lipnack provided tips for operating what they called “far-flung teams” or groups with people working at different locations.

Thanks to writer John Richmeier for including us in the piece. You can see our full presentation to the conference by clicking here: The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams.

Teams of practice

We've been hanging out at the collaboration bar for a bit of time now, which means that we've seen a few different customers take stools, saying *theirs* is the only drink to order. They down a few and poof! they're gone.

Some have stuck. For at least a decade and a half, communities of practice have held their seat. Ever since Etienne Wenger (hello, old friend) coined the phrase in his and Jean Lave's 1991 book, Situated Learning, savvy organizations have been promoting their use. Among the first was Bob Buckman, then CEO of Buckman Labs, the specialty chemical company, who turned his entire organization into one gigantic global community of practice years before most reading here even had email accounts. We documented Bob's story in Virtual Teams--and, perhaps more importantly, he documented it himself in Building the Knowledge-Driven Organization.

Not long after people in the collaboration community (which will have to be a subject of another post someday) started to use the term "communities of practice" came its partner-in-crime, knowledge management, whose history Karl-Erik Sveiby, the Swedish writer and consultant, has been tracking for years.

Comes then a whole sector of the tech industry focused on making it easier for people to "manage" their knowledge, a concept that bears reflecting upon elsewhere (is knowledge manageable as, say, people are? - I'll let that one go for now). Also comes then all manner of upstart efforts within organizations to swap learning as fast as possible, often without their employers' imprimaturs.

Among these were two majors in the US Army, Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, who, without sanction or budget or business plan, started Companycommand.com. There soldiers could exchange, well, war stories. A good summary of their experience is documented in the Government Executive article, "Managing Technology Linked in the Fight," which was laid out in detail in the 2005 book, CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional, which the two majors along with two others co-authored with Professor Nancy Dixon.

All of which is a windy introduction to the fact that the US Army has a long, rich history in communities of practice with now probably tens of thousands of online forums where soldiers of every rank can exchange information in a timely way.

So it was that the Army held its 3rd Annual Knowledge Management Conference last week, where we, along with Dr. Dixon and others, gave talks, ours titled The Transformational Power of Networks, Teamnets and Virtual Teams. Lots of discussion about communities of practice, knowledge sharing, semantic webs, and all the other topics that IT professionals, learning experts, and the top brass, whether those with stars on their shoulders or big paychecks, worry about.

OK. What's next? Jeff and I came away thinking about this: perhaps the era of the community of practice needs to morph a bit. Aren't we now in the time when teams, not just amorphous communities or lone-ranger individuals, need to share practices? And isn't the technology up to the task, what with virtual (or, if you prefer, global) teams exploding everywhere and wikis for teams going up on the web faster than their IT departments can track them? Teams, we think, are the way to work (without diminishing the genius and creativity of the individual), the hope for solving the seemingly intractable problems that sometimes make it hard to get up in the morning.

Thus, we invite a new customer to the collaboration bar: Teams of Practice, the title of this post.

Building trust in virtual teams--a survey from Jordan

Frequent readers know that one of our purposes here is to help students conduct research on virtual teams, collaboration, and networks (and maybe something else if it seems relevant or appealing). One such inquiry came from Ernest Kutuk at the University of Zagreb in Croatia, studying trust in virtual teams. Thus, let me say again: students, feel free to email me with your projects and if they fit these broad criteria, you're in.

Just a few hours ago, we received our first such request from a student at the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST), on the same topic as the Croatian request.

Mohamad Alsharo is studying for his master's degree in computer science, majoring in project management. As part of this work, he's doing a survey on trust in virtual teams, thus his contacting us. Here's Mohamad's note. I encourage everyone to fill out the survey. And, Mohamad, be sure to report back on your results so I can post those too:

My master's thesis is something new in Jordan. No one here has ever worked on virtual teams so this may open a new scope for our students. In my thesis, I'm trying to come up with a model for building trust among virtual teams members. I've been working on this topic for almost 18 months now and have put my results into a survey that I am distributing to both virtual teams researchers and practitioners to see if they agree or disagree my conclusion.

For this reason I have divided my survey into three parts. The first is for Researchers, the second is for Team Leaders, and the third is for Team Members. I hope you can help me in my research and I'm ready for any questions or suggestions from you.

My survey links are:
Researchers: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/Academic.phtml
Team Leaders: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/leaders.phtml
Team Members: http://www.my3q.com/home2/185/msharo83/members.phtml

Thank you again and I'm looking forward to hearing from you,

Mohamad Alsharo

The art of networks

If there was one persistent image that threaded through the presentations at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems, it was the network. Whether the presenter was a biologist, physicist, mathematician, or some other specialist whose field I couldn't quite comprehend, he or she showed a graph of a network. Even Nicholas Christakis, the internist and social scientist, who presented the latest findings of the famous Framingham Heart Study, had network graphs illustrating where smokers in the study have ended up (on the periphery) and how obesity patterns observed different patterns (linked to norms rather than behaviors).

These are gorgeous images, these networks. Bill Ives, whose presentation on blogs at KM Cluster's Inside Social Networks two years ago was instrumental in my becoming a blogger, points to an astonishing collection of links to network images at Trust Art, including those at visualcomplexity. Serious major wow.

Bill's work on blogs deserves greater mention. I've had the chance to talk to Bill a number of times over the past two years. Each time I do, I learn something else about blogging. In our most recent conversation, he pointed out how important it is to use meaningful words when you link, meaning that it's better to call out Trust Art for its collection of links on "trust metrics" than it is to say that they're here. Why? Because the search engines can't do much with the word here but they will pick up on Trust Art or trust metrics.

Over time, Bill has developed a method for blogging with which he advises businesses. Following his approach, hits, that all-important measure, rise, making for happier bloggers. I admire Bill's work and have benefited greatly from his generous sharing of knowledge. His description of his Business Blog Coaching and Consulting Services is worth clicking through to.

Plumbing the depths of complexity

There are a lot of extraordinarily smart people and every now and then one (me) gets the chance to listen to them speak. Such was the case this week at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems here in Boston. Though I couldn't attend the whole thing, I did have the opportunity to dip in for some very interesting presentations. And Jeff Stamps and I even got plenary time for our talk, Are Organizations Networks? (Contest: Guess what we think?)

I've already blogged Science Editor Barbara Jasny's inside look at publishing in this esteemed journal. Though I missed it, attendees, including my hubby, raved about Phil Zimbardo's flashy presentation on The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, his new book. Dr. Zimbardo explains the material he presented at the conference:

The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.

Two presentations that I wandered into without knowing what I was doing turned out to be very interesting:  Raffaele Calabretta is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council...and a novelist. Dr. Calabretta's novel, The Movie of Emotions (Il Film Delle Emozioni) uses a variety of forms -- diary, files, a film script -- strung together as tidbits in which the main character struggles with his desire to be happy while exploring concepts of complexity. Tall-order writing, awaiting an American publisher, at which point I will be an early one to render an opinion on how successfully he has carried it off. Great idea in the spirit of experimental literature.

Later, in search of an outlet, I took a seat in the back of the room at a plenary session, where the guy at the front first got my attention because he looked a bit like someone I know then caused me to stop typing when I heard him say "tensegrity," key word of our beloved mentor, Bucky Fuller, and geodesic, and even Fuller. Dr. Don Ingber's talk, Principles of Bio-inspired Engineering, included his pulling out a tensegrity toy. He's got a whole lab at Boston's Children's Hospital where they study cell development and regulation that includes Bucky's principles, which is what he talked about (I think):

We introduced the concept that living cells stabilize their internal cytoskeleton, and control their shape and mechanics, using the architectural system first described by Buckminster Fuller known as "tensegrity."

This post is getting long and I haven't even tackled the remarks of the banquet speaker, Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes (US Army, Retired), which provoked the taking of some six pages of notes. Big challenges ahead, folks, including environmental collapse, population explosion, and terrorism, and he put it to the complexity scientists at the meeting to get to work on them--fast. It was a soundless room until the questions began. I hope to have the time to relay what he said but, assuming I won't given the very near-term challenges I have (read deadlines), keep an eye out for the chance to hear him.

It's so complex

Rare confluence of the complexity gods this week in Boston as The New England Complex Systems Institute sponsors the annual International Conference on Complex Systems 2007. Aesthetics, biology, social systems, engineering, biology, and, of course, networks all get their due over the next week. Catch us on Network Day, Friday, Nov 2, which begins with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus receiving the Herbert Simon Award. Simon wrote the seminal article, The Architecture of Complexity, in 1962.

Reply to this post and/or email me if you're attending: jessica dot lipnack at netage.

Energy-conscious computing

Some years ago, we were in a joint venture with the dearly departed Digital Equipment Corporation. The purpose was to build a regional "computer conferencing" system, called, yes, New England Commons, that would then link to the other regional computer conferencing systems, notably, Metanet in Washington, DC., Unison, a similar system in Denver, and, in the Bay Area, you guessed it, The Well. Some day, the business plan read, all of these regional systems would meld into one national system allowing people all over the country to talk to one another online. Name of the parent company: Internetwork Communications. We called it Internet and the year was 1985.

Why were there regional systems in those days? Because the cost of connection--via dial-up--was prohibitive way back then...as in $25/hour. That's right, $25 per hour, or, if you worked a package, $22.50. (Now go complain about your montly cable-modem or DSL fee..)

For those unfamiliar with the term, a computer conferencing system was the ancestor of bulletin boards, discussion forums, and even the much-tossed-about term-du-jour, wikis.

Point of all this is that in order to install the hardware for this enterprise, we had to build a room outfitted with its own power system, air conditioning, raised floor and what I recall as a zillion other things we had to become quickly expert in. Transporting "the computer" (a VAX 11/780 plus racks and racks for the modems) to our second-floor office in Waltham, Mass., required hiring a crane. And as soon as it was operational, our power bill went through the third-floor roof.

I've been sensitive to the power needs of computing ever since and go to some effort, i.e. crawl around the floor turning off power strips, to reduce the drain on electricity when my machine is off (this in my home office).

All of which leads to a good post today that goes a bit deeper into what server farms and the like require in major operations centers, like hospitals. CareGroup's CIO "geekdoctor" John Halamka, a low-carbon-footprint kinda guy, sheds some light, so to speak, on the tradeoffs that he and his folks think about when adding MIPS. They've even hired a full-time power engineer:

Power consumption and heat is increasing to the point that data centers cannot sustain the number of servers that the real estate can accommodate. The solution is to deploy servers much more strategically. We’ve started a new “Kill-a-watt” program and are now balancing our efforts between supply and demand. We are more conservative about adding dedicated servers for every new application, challenging vendor requirements when dedicated servers are requested, examining the efficiency of power supplies, and performing energy efficiency checks on the mechanical/electrical systems supporting the data center.

Mr. Gore, virtual teamer (and Nobelist)

Most know Al Gore these days as the environmental protector (and possibly the world's best Powerpoint presenter). Others know him, as he says in one of the greatest opening lines of any speaker, the man "who used to be the next president of the United States."

We "know" him (note quotes) as the designer of one of the best virtual teaming projects we've ever worked on.

In 1993, then Vice President Gore was leading the National Partnership for Reinventing Government (originally called the National Performance Review), the 500th study of how to streamline, shrink, and simplify the mammoth beast that is the US government. Gore's design was unique: instead of hiring consultants, he recruited volunteers from within the agencies and departments. They, in turn, staffed cross-functional teams that studied each government entity. If you were from the Justice Department, you might serve on the Dept of Agriculture team, along with people from what was then called Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Dept of Energy, and so on.

These volunteers were good, very good. They in turn recruited every and anyone with a new idea about organizations, business, and communication, i.e. every legitimate book writer they could lay their hands on. Tom Peters kicked off the five-month effort in Mellon Auditorium and for every Wednesday following, anyone with a book vaguely related to organizational life was invited to a brown-bag lunch.

We got our call just as our book, The TeamNet Factor: Bringing the Power of Boundary Crossing into the Heart of Your Business, was in production. Marion Metcalf, a staffer at INS and a key member of the Reinventing Government staff, read the galleys of the book, called, and said that boundary crossing was key to their work--and to their sustaining the energy behind the project. We've told the detailed story of what happened next here in our following book, The Age of the Network. The cross-boundary design of the project which encouraged, indeed required, people to team up outside their agencies' walls proved a powerful engine. For years following, NetResults, the network that we helped launch as the project came to a close in the same auditorium where Tom Peters keynoted the project's beginning, maintained connections among NPRG staffers, some of whom we're still in communication with today.

During our days working on this project, we heard only praise for Al Gore, adjectives like hard working, smart, insightful, visionary.

Highest salutes today to you, Al Gore.

Facing the facts about Facebook

If you're reading this post, Facebook is not for you. Of course, if you're reading this post, it may be because you were referred from my Facebook page.

Yes, my friends, I am on Facebook and so are a lot of my other friends. And I use the f-word without quotes.

But an op-ed in the October 6, 2007, New York Times, The Fakebook Generation, by Alice Mathias says, in short, that us old people run the risk of missing the point. What's new there? I first became aware of how much of the point I was missing some years ago when I added an article to Phish and my daughters nearly expired from laughter. The and Phish do not a match make.

Ms. Mathias, a 2007 grad of Dartmouth College (and a very good writer), explains that Facebook is for fun and those of us who've joined since the floodgates opened to the AARP gen and their younger sibs this past spring may be delusional. Again, no dispute. The question remains: Can social networking sites a la Facebook and MySpace and who-knows-how-many-others actually offer anything of value to us working hacks?

Possibly. Frankly, though, I was shocked when the head of a software company, a contemporary, mind you, wrote me a note in early July saying that he hadn't found me on Facebook, that I apparently "wasn't into that." This was about the same time that I went to the meeting where I learned that Email is for old people (the young 'uns post for all the world to see, a point that Ms. Mathias makes). Advance the calendar another month and the head of a medical center invites me to be his "friend" on Facebook. Well, I like his blog so why not follow his lead to Facebook?

So off I go, feeling rather lonely as he was my only friend...for about two or three hours, whereupon I began to bump into all kinds of people I know, seriously, people I've known for years (or, in some cases, months), business colleagues, friends from the Internet wayback machine (hello, Howard, hello, Izumi), the nephew of a mentor whom I met some years ago (rattttther well known in publishing), and, of course, my 16-year-old godson, my 18-year-old nephew, and, yes, my daughter. And then people started "friending" me, people who saw my name on someone else's list of friends, people who'd read one of our books or had been to a talk I (or we) had given or some other flattering association.

All nice but useful? Well, in just a few weeks, I've been asked to write an article for a CIO publication, a foreword to a book, AND gotten help for another piece I've just finished for FreePint (thank you, David Coleman, Michael Sampson, and Loretta Donovan).

And I find myself feeling a bit silly from time to time as I ponder how many "friends" I have and consider adding frivolous widgets to my Facebook facility. How about you, my friends?

NB: Even The New Yorker has been reporting on Facebook. See Sept 17, 2007, Icebreaker Dept: Social Studies, which, needless to say, I blogged.

The whole organization in a stadium

Is this scene familiar? You're new to an organization--as employee, partner, supplier, board member, chief executive, whatever, you're new. And you want to understand how things work. So the person you're talking to whips out an org chart, talks about the boxes, then picks up a pen and starts crossing boxes out, drawing  dotted lines, adding other boxes that are actually off the chart.

We wondered what would happen if you could "see" the whole organization at once: who works for whom, who reports "dotted-line," who belongs to what team, how the workflow itself progresses.

So we've written The Stadium Parable, wherein you, mythical CEO, invite your whole organization to a stadium to conduct an exercise whereby everyone draws all the lines of work connections (to see in web pages, click here). Possible? We think so.

"(We) will reduce number of layers from ... 11 to about 7"

The new CEO at BP is shaking things up, or perhaps better said, taking things out. CNNMoney.com quotes Tony Hayward in BP Shares sinks as CE0 warns on results:  "'There is massive duplication and lack of clarity of who does what,'" the [Financial Times] quoted Hayward as saying. "'We will reduce the number of organization units. (We) will reduce the number of layers from the workers up to the CEO from 11 to about seven.'"

Is that the right number, Mr. Hayward?  How do you know what the right number is? Using OrgScope, we found 11 levels at one of the energy giant's competitors--and its shares are not sinking.

How do you determine the right number of levels in an organization the size of BP, with in the neighborhood of 100K employees and perhaps 10x that number more in contractors? What number allows the chief executive and senior leaders to "spot weaknesses and areas for improvement," as one energy executive said to us.

The deeper question here is not about a target number of levels but about whether the structure optimizes strategy.

More on trust in virtual teams

Web Worker Daily's Anne Zelenka points through to another good post on building trust in virtual teams, this article by Kelly Pate Dwyer on BNET.

I'm in on the four attributes Dwyer cites for remote managers: passion, availability, patience and reliability, and in on four of her "five ways to build trust." The last, the need to show up face-to-face, is not borne out by the research that underlies "Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?", the Harvard Business Review article we did with Profs Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Molhatra. That said, here's Dwyer's good list:

1. Be available. Don’t let employee calls go to voicemail. When you absolutely can’t be reached, reply ASAP.
2. Beware of using sarcasm and teasing in distance interactions, like email and conference calls, where signals can easily get crossed.
3. Handle sensitive issues with discretion. One team member might tell Belmont that another is having a bad day. He’ll immediately call the person having the bad day, without exposing the colleague who told him.
4. Communicate in a variety of ways (email, phone, in person, etc) and often.
5. Visit employees on their turf. It shows respect for their time and interest in their life outside the job.

Virtual team training at ICIC

Spent last Thursday at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City here in Boston. ICIC is the brainchild of Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor who wrote the books on competition and who wrote the prescription for releasing the "wealth of the inner city," one of his phrases: See  "The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,"  Harvard Business Review.

ICIC's mission from its website:

To promote economic prosperity in America’s inner cities through private sector engagement that leads to jobs, income and wealth creation for local residents. ICIC brings together business and civic leaders to drive innovation and action, transform thinking and accelerate inner city business growth and investment. 

Thus, ICIC works across boundaries--with clients, experts, donors, competitors, kids--and to assist, we provided our Virtual Team Training--evaluation, exercises and examples, with a virtual-team model and a little vision for the future.

ICIC, welcome to the world of virtual teams.

Jeff Stamps at MTLC Tech Trends Forum today

NetAge's own Jeff Stamps, our Chief Scientist and inventor of our technology, was the lead-off speaker at the Mass Technology Leadership Council's Tech Trends Forum that took place today in Waltham, Mass. The focus of the session was "Making the Workplace Thrive with Collaboration." Jeff put the emphasis on the people side of collaboration, often overlooked in favor of a focus on pure technology. Slides from his presentation are here.

"Enterprise and team collaboration requires new principles, behaviors, and tools," Jeff said, illustrating how organizations can capture and embed their knowledge by consistent use of online spaces."

According to one of the organizers of the event, Jeff was quite a hit:

Jeff -- great job at the Mass Tech Leadership Council's Tech Trends Forum on the Enterprise Web and Collaboration.  Your presentation was excellent and your handling of a variety of questions in the dialogue with participants just reeked (this is a compliment :-) )with experience, knowledge and insight regarding the subjects and issues discussed.     Many thanks

"Google Docs in Plain English"

Google hardly needs my help in promotion but I'm more than happy to raise the flag again for my new best friends at CommonCraft. Got an email today from Lee LeFever, who, with Sachi LeFever, is cranking out the very clear and useful little videos on Web 2.0-y type stuff. This one is Google Docs in Plain English, adding to RSS in Plain English, Wikis in Plain English, and Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Never heard of Google Docs? I hadn't until about nine months ago when I found myself on a planning call for Enterprise 2.0. A woman for whom I have the deepest respect - and whom I would call first if I started to think I'd completely lost my way in the 2.0-world - said, "Everyone's sending Google Docs around." They are/were? I was, as usual, out of it. Turns out that Google has cracked the collaboration nut, which, of course, has been cracked so many times before, but they made it even easier to share docs (i.e. real documents, spreadsheets, and such not) on the web.  It's an alternative to expensive enterprise knowledge management systems (oops, I recently was told that knowledge management is passe as a term) or home-cooking of web sites for document sharing.

What CommonCraft has done is to explain Google's solution, yet again "in plain English." Very well done, once more, Lee and Sachi. And by all means, keep churning out this stuff. Nothing I've seen in years has been this concise and useful. (Google Docs Team was the client for this so thanks to you guys too for commissioning these great conceptual artists.)

And, IT, HR, and Communication departments: Hire them!

Virtual teams and security

Further to what I learned last week at the Brookings event where I presented "Virtual Teams in the Age of the Network," a popular topic that we've discussed with groups in a variety of sectors over the years. As some readers here know, our writing books on this topic has led to organizations implementing the methods we've developed (Non-profits! Ahoy! We offer complimentary versions to you.) So I talked about our methodology (students, repeat: People, Purpose, Links, and Time) and about the gotcha's that other organizations, both commercial and non-profit, are experiencing.

Thus I was struck by the repeated questions raised by this group of government officials. Time and again, people asked about security. How can confidential, indeed, sometimes classified, information really be protected? How can people work from home when they're logging in via unsecured (insecure?) lines?

As we looked at this issue from various perspectives, I remembered something a three-star general in the US Army said not long ago in a conference call where we presented: he's able to do 90% of his work from home. But those far down the chain are much more restricted. One attorney went so far as to say that he wondered whether it was better to revert to paper, forsaking electronic communication altogether.

Is this where we are?

Are you email immune?

Web Worker Daily has another good one today by Anne Zelenka on the dilemma of email. Short responses, long? Delayed, immediate? Email is still in elementary school compared with, say, how to behave on the phone. Pieces like Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict over Email Etiquette are good assists to growing up (Keen readers remember Email is for old people here.)

Email immunity is unevenly distributed — some people have become almost entirely immune while others still treat it as a privileged and prioritized channel. Plus, entire generations are less susceptible to email communications: many twentysomethings and teenagers prefer instant messaging and texting.

Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter, and other alternative tools trump email and make some people more immune to email than others. Early adopters of social tools are likely to be relatively more immune to email.

This uneven distribution of email immunity leads to conflict over how to handle email. People with little immunity to email react with indignation to suggestions that you might worry less about responding to email or leave your inbox full or prioritize brevity over niceties. At the same time, those with more immunity question lengthy email discussions, complex email processing schemes, and overly elaborate email etiquette guidelines.

Virtual Teams and our other books online

With the September 11 anniversary approaching, I'm thinking about those terrible days and how distraught we were over how to respond. Everyone wanted to do something, but what? In addition to the horrific loss of life and eternal sadness that the attacks brought, thousands of enterprises instantly were put out of work. No one could go into the office because the offices were gone. One thing we knew for certain was that we here at NetAge had reams of useful information for people who suddenly needed to work at a distance. But how to quickly distribute what we knew without making things more difficult for those trying to cope?

Jeff Stamps, my co-author and the Big Thinker here at NetAge, had a great idea: Post our books to the web, available free for download to anyone. Which is what we did six years ago. Click this link.

Happy birthday to Web Worker Daily

I don't know the folks who pump out the useful stuff for Web Worker Daily, but I sure like them. Started a year ago today, this informative blog is dedicated to Pajama Nation, those toilers on the homefront for the workfront.

Take a look. In the month or so that I've been reading, I've found much to think about and have linked two posts here, one on "the social graph problem" and the other on the advantage of using multiple monitors.

From today's one-year-anniversary post:

On Labor Day 2006, Om Malik and the GigaOM team started this blog/community as a resource for (and a salute to) those of us who were living a sockless lifestyle:

"What are the best tools and what is the right gear to stay in touch with your team? How do you motivate your distributed teams when you are all dispersed all over the planet? The answers for these questions are hard to come by, and it was precisely for these reasons, we are introducing a new group weblog/community, Web Worker Daily."

"The new social etiquette"

The lake is silk this morning, a fishing boat picking up a bit of speed and heading toward Moultonboro, otherwise not a riffle on the Smile of the Great Spirit. Which makes this post even more ridiculous, sitting at the picnic table, waiting for the wood chips to soak before firing up the smoker that my hubby and kids fabricated yesterday out of a garbage can, steel rods, and a hotplate.

Though many people in the US are on vacation (holiday to our Euro friends) this week in anticipation of the official end of summer next Monday (Labor Day), I feel compelled to mention an ad that fell out of WIRED last night. At least, here in heaven, I wasn't reading it. Keen readers may recall my previous post questioning how I came to be a recipient of WIRED.

Helio, a new service of Earthlink and SK Telecomm, is offering us "The Mobile User's Guide to The New Social Etiquette." Here you can get your mobile device along with a heaping serving of how to behave online. It is bold and dismissive: "Voice Call--If you don't know what it is, then please just give this book away." Yes, it's a whole booklet of admonitions. And it harkens back to yet another post here, "Email is for old people," by letting us know that Helio Ocean (tm) "is bringing email back." Did it go somewhere?

I predict: The Messieurs Stewart and Colbert will have a feast with this advertising bonanza.

And...having read the whole thing AND gone to their site, I remain clueless as to what Helio is.

OH! All you guys reading this! Beware! Never send an emoticon to another guy. "Unless [you] like the other guy. A lot." AND "No emoticons unless you've met the other person face to face [sic] or at least sent a picture." Really? I'm sooo 20th-century.

The social graph problem

Here's one most people reading aren't worried about - yet: The social graph problem. What happens when you join social networking sites, whether for work or for "social?" For each new service - Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and on and on (one estimate is that there are 5000 social applications/sites floating around as of now), you have to build a new network of "friends." What if you had just one and it belonged to you?

Web Worker Daily, my new best friend, reported on this a few days ago. Raises lots of questions. Different networks for different purposes? Of course. Do we need a site that manages your networks on all your other sites (as they say, this quickly becomes ratttthhhher meta)? Will any of this last anyway, in which case, why bother?

Patti Anklam ferreted out the Welsh word for this: cynefin, the place of my many belongings.

Many different networks, together a person doth make.

IT spending as percentage of revenue?

Does it make sense to key IT spending directly to revenue? An email from a colleague spotlights perhaps unanticipated consequences of this policy: No more telecommuting. Despite the fact that a large majority of the company's employees (2:1) work most directly with people in distant locations. Now this global IT company is requiring everyone to come into work. Got it? You drive into an office to work with people oceans away. Costs more to support IT from people's homes than from central locations? I don't get this.

"Tiny to-do lists" at Web Worker

Good thinking again at Web Worker by Leo Babuata, this time on the dreaded to-do list: make them tiny. Here. Anyone remember the "Few Big Rules" from the '90s? These two ideas should get together. 

The only person phoning in

For reasons as yet unrevealed (and certainly not because I subscribe to the fine Interweave Knits), about six months ago, WIRED showed up in my mail. And I don't mean my inbox. We have an old-fashioned mail slot cut into the wall by the front door of our old house. For the past six months or so, WIRED has been among the daily deluge of catalogs. When the August issue arrived, I got excited. "How To: ... " followed by a long list that included "Rule the Blogosphere" and "Email like a Pro" got me turning pages.

Well, I'm still looking for tips on how to rule the blogosphere. Great cover teaser, no article by that name. But -- and especially if -- you're a cube captain with action figures decorating your work space, there's lots here for you (e.g., never place Wonder Woman and Superman in, you know, suggestive positions).

There's a great 100-word (if that) squib on what to do if you're the only person dialing into a conference call: "Announce yourself when it begins and remind people that you cannot see air quotes or scribbles on the whiteboard. Have an intern email you digital snaps. Don't be afraid to ask for clarification. And mute your phone when you're not speaking, so no one hears SportsCenter in the background." OR, perhaps, ask your co-workers to use web conferencing?

"Email like a Pro" is terrific if you're, how shall I say this, engaged in shady activities? The six pointers are aimed at keeping you out of court, or jail, I can't tell. The actual title of this one, "Lawyer-Proof Your Email," requires no further clarification.

There is a good little list on how to use a wiki. Other than that, the tips on how to refill the watercooler and how to bully your coworkers into donating more leave me, well, wondering why WIRED has sought me out.

Holding the pose

About a month ago, a young friend with whom I've practiced yoga many times, told me she'd just done "breakthrough yoga." I wondered what she meant specifically but understood from experience without her answering. A yoga session where you feel "back," where you're limber, aligned, in balance, at peace with your body. How had she gotten there this time, I asked?

"Holding the pose," she said. "Things happen when you hold the pose." She went on to say that she'd been holding headstand and shoulder-stand for five minutes each, forward bend for ten, twenty minutes of Sun Salutation. If you've done any of these postures, you can appreciate what these lengths of time mean. If you've never done yoga, try this: Lean forward, trying to touch your finger tips to your toes. Now stay there for ten minutes. That's what forward bend is (also done seated and with infinite variations).

So the next time I did yoga, I got out a digital clock, moved it to various spots so that I could see it (just try looking at a clock in headstand), and held and held and held. Things do happen when you hold the pose. Awareness of tight muscles that soften, gripping that loosens, leaning more to one side than the other that rights itself. Things happen and suddenly you're considerably more straight, palpably more relaxed, stronger, more centered. This is why I love yoga.

Yoga postures -- asanas in the lexicon -- are challenging. Even "corpse" pose -- where all you do is lie in a relaxed state on the floor -- is a challenge when done properly. Same is true for most challenges. The longer you stay with them, the more you learn, the more resistance gives way.

I offer this to all who are trying things that seem impossible or just plain difficult. Hold the pose and things happen.

Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA

Ellen Meister is a generous contributor to Zoetrope, where I met her. Over the past few years, she's let other Zoetropers peer into her experience as a first-time author with a two-book deal. Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA came out in hardcover in '06, as did the audio version narrated by Lisa Kudrow; paperback out now. Ellen's doing a virtual book tour, meaning interviews with her in lots of places.

Jump to take Ellen's tour with her:

Virtual Teams at SAP

My virtual teams alert brought me this article by Isabelle Chan from ZDNet, SAP takes AP shared services to new level. I left a comment with two questions:

1. How does SAP reward its virtual teams?

2. How do the co-located teams stay tight with remote folks?

Inviting response from all you folks at SAP, who work with SAP, who worked at SAP, use SAP. There's a
huge body of knowledge about the virtual teams at this and other companies. And for those who have no clue re: SAP, what about you? How do you reward your virtual teams and keep "far-flung" members close?

Jump to my response to Isabelle Chan's article: