The Institute for Corporate Leadership surveyed 500+ organizations and pulled together the results in Taking the Pulse: Virtual Leadership, a free, downloadable report, worth taking a look at. What jumps out? The finding that leadership development fails to properly address the new challenges introduced by virtual working. Only 3% of those responding said that leading at a distance is covered to "a very high extent" in their development courses.
Kay Lazar's piece in this morning's Boston Globe is another worth the click: "Harvard medical researchers to pool work." For access to hundreds of millions in NIH grants over the next five years, the mano a mano among Harvard Medical School affiliated hospitals also will have to give sway to a new martial art: cooperation. Grant criteria mandate that fierce competitors work together on specific projects, forming always-on "communities of practice" that cross organizational boundaries. The purpose of the arrangement is to "shorten the time it takes to turn discovery into treatment." Harvard Medical School hands out the allowances. NB: The grants represent only a portion of NIH research dollars available to the institutions but still it's a great start in putting our best medical minds together here in Boston:
There will be matchmakers to introduce scientists who have never met because they have been hunkered in their isolated research labs. A massive, centralized database will give Harvard's researchers instant access to one another's work.
..."There has always been a disincentive to collaborate," said Dr. Lee Nadler, codirector of Harvard's new Clinical and Translational Science Center, which will link researchers and allocate Harvard's grant money..
"If we succeed in doing what we are trying to do, then it will become far easier for studies that relate to specific diseases to be carried out for the maximum benefit of patients," he said. "We also will be training people to carry out this type of collaborative research in the future."
Last year, Johns Hopkins University was awarded one of the new grants from NIH in an earlier round of funding, and leaders there have since found collaboration to be a strong learning experience.
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.
Tivoli Garden, Copenhagen, 3 June 2005, ducks talking to Danes
Copenhagen, the play by Michael Frayn, got a long Louise Kennedy review in today's Boston Globe. I've been waiting since we saw it this past Wednesday.
A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., which is staging the play until Feb 3, is a stunning space - you walk in on the stage floor, seating stadium style on sides, and "in front," the many tiers that face the set. In this case, being seated on the side seemed an advantage. The play requires thinking from many perspectives and having to watch from an oblique vantage is conceptually fitting.
"The set:" Three large oval light tracks arced at odd angles to one another circle the ceiling. "Electrons" whip around at various intervals, flick on at different times during the performance. Mirrors along the back wall are the stage design; the set comprises three chairs that the characters move around the stage. That's it.
Characters: Three - 1. Niels Bohr (Will LeBow), the Danish physicist who proposed "complementarity," the principle that says, in essence, you can't have black without white - in physics, his theory is connected with waves and particles - one can't exist without the other; 2. Margrethe Bohr (Karen MacDonald), wife of same, mother of six sons (one of whose deaths provides a refrain in the play), typist of manuscripts, and the character who translates physics into English - and humanity - on the stage; and 3. Werner Heisenberg (John Kuntz), the German physicist whose name precedes "uncertainty principle," meaning that once you start studying something, your intervention so changes what you're studying that it's not the same thing as when you started.
Plot: In 1941, Heisenberg arrives in Copenhagen for a meeting with Bohr. "Why did you come to Copenhagen?" Margrethe repeats this line many times in the play. It's the central question that allows the characters to reflect on their lives (when the play opens they're all dead; everything is a flashback), explore physics, argue about collaborating with the Nazis, hint at the nuclear bomb projects underway in both Germany and the US, mourn, walk away, come back, and love one another - even as they all have different memories of how those discussions transpired.
The characters play their parts in relationship to one another and comment to the audience, the work of narration passing among them as they discuss ethics, science, families, politics, the Nazis, love, skiing, Norway, walking, babies, anti-semitism, Einstein, drowning, each with its complement, each uncertain.
Powerful, powerful. Complementarity has been a big topic in our house since hubby Jeff used it as one of two core principles (the other was level structure) underlying "human systems theory" in his dissertation. Thus, the play picked up a lot of threads we've talked about.
I kept wishing I had the script in my lap as the ideas are heady, worth thinking about at a slower pace. An editor friend whom we went with said she wished she could have had at the script - would have removed a third of the lines she said. I can understand this. The sheer complexity of the material might be easier to comprehend if the acts were shorter. In one sense, it's a really long lecture about the most abstract of ideas.
Last point, bloggers: Those involved are keeping a blog about the production. "Heisenberg" (who signs his posts "johnny kuntz") is posting about his part, what it's like to rehearse, and such, very interesting. And today, Nick Peterson (thanks for inviting us, Nick) posts an email they received from Heisenberg's son Jochen Heisenberg, professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire (Jeff's alma mater), who apparently attended the same performance we did:
Thank you indeed for the wonderful experience of seeing this different Copenhagen performance. As you know, we have been guests at a number of performances since the NY opening in 2000, and I have had the burdensome opportunity to become a participant in those symposia that dealt with the controversy arising out of this play.
What was so refreshing this time was the fact that the play was allowed to be a drama on many levels and that the one-dimensional, contentious aspects did not dominate the many-layered personal story.
Now in its sixth year, the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations (yes, a whole journal devoted to it!) has a special issue on trust in virtual teams. No, I haven't read it but the topics, as per the post on Inderscience News, the publisher's blog, sound right on, including trust in electronic mentoring relationships, in virtual communities, in virtual project management success, and, most intriguing title, "Flows, bridges and brokers: exploring the development of trust relations in a distributed work groups."
From the editors' introduction:
To accomplish a rapid and high level of interaction amongst people who have often never met each other let alone had the luxury of a long and established work relationship, the establishment of trust and effect shared communication systems become of paramount importance. The key question then becomes 'how to rapidly develop and foster trust in virtual teams?' This is the challenge that faces all virtual organisations today and therefore, the central focus of this special issue.
Last week I posted a phenomenal statistic regarding the largest number of authors to submit a joint article to Science: 350. I stand corrected. Today's issue of Science makes it clear: The Pierre Auger Collaboration of 445** scientists collectively penned Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Extragalactic Objects. I'm certain I would be floored by the findings (if only I could understand them) but I am astonished at what it must have taken just to get the first sentence agreed to. Another item for my "I've got to find out more about this" list.
**Thanks to Barbara Jasny, who just sent the article with this detail.
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.phtmlThank you again and I'm looking forward to hearing from you,
Mohamad Alsharo
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.
A bit of self-referential reporting here: Milestone Group has published its quarterly journal, wherein lies our "invited article," The Strange Beauty of Virtual Teams. Click and enjoy.
For any writers interested in how something like this comes about, here's the backstory. Shortly after joining Facebook in September of this year, I received a "friend" request from Mark Zawacki, founder and managing partner of Milestone Group. Turned out that Mark had read The TeamNet Factor, our 1993 book, as a result of his having worked at Index Systems, a consulting company where we'd done some work. Once he found me on Facebook, he asked if we'd like to contribute to his journal. Took a look and quickly agreed. This issue, for example, has an interview with our friend Nova Spivack of Radar Networks; an opinion piece by Eric Benhamou, now a venture capitalist and chairman of 3Com, where he was CEO; and an editorial by Milestone's Bill Burk with the intriguing title of Why Nine Men Can't Make a Baby in a Month.
Thanks, Mark, and to Jim Conley, blogger at On Brookline, who edits the journal.
Barbara Jasny, Supervisory Senior editor for Science, the weekly publication of AAAS, was the lead-off evening speaker last night at the 7th International Conference on Complex Systems. In the audience were scores of scientists hoping to score at Science, among the more than 1 million readers.
I took some notes that I hope you'll find interesting: Science was founded by none other than Thomas Edison in 1880 (prompting one audience member to ask why they don't publish more in the engineering sciences--"we'd like to," Jasny said; ratio of pieces published--60:40, physical:biological sciences). They receive 230 manuscripts EVERY WEEK, which go out to a board of 100 reviewers. Of these, 70% go back to the authors within two weeks (aka rejected); of the remaining 30%, 10% are published.
Once you pass the first hurdle, you're handed off to the pool of 27 editors, all PhDs or MDs, many with post-doc degrees. Guess I won't be applying for a job there, though, transparently, I could write or call any of them as all their emails and telephone numbers are published. Your work sees the light of print if: it's your best; it will have major impact; it's a solution to a long-standing problem; and/or others will be interested.
Over time, published material has changed quite a lot. What was interesting research 15 years ago is wildly different today. Example cited was that Science once published the sequence of a newly-identified gene, then the genome, and more recently the genome as a tool and the genome as a network. (The network pictures of the genome looked remarkably like the networks we map in organizations.) Recent years have seen an absolute explosion in data, Jasny said, which has led to the journal tending to publish shorter articles with massive databases available online. Generally speaking, you don't get published if you won't make your data publicly available.
Jasny noted another major shift: the authorship of papers has evolved in the past 25 years. Where once a few chemists would team up, now bylines include people from a number of disciplines working on different aspects of a problem, then reporting their results together. Meanwhile, new fields are evolving, like neuroeconomics, microtubule dynamics, biomolecules in nanotechnology, geomicrobiology, and, music to the ears of those at the conference, systems approaches. Likewise, scientists are tackling more complex problems that fall under the rubric of "syndemics," like AIDS, which, in addition to the base science, requires study of gender discrimination, public fear, poverty, and government policy.
"And now we're seeing larger and larger collaborations," she said. One astronomy paper may take the world's record for number of authors: 350!
And lest you think they're all just abstruse scientists with no sense of fun, consider their newest feature by "The Gonzo Scientist," John Bohannon. His current project? He's living in a spacesuit for a month and reporting how it feels.
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.
Maybe all you bloggers reading here already know this. I did not until Jim Conley, who keeps the well-read On Brookline blog, came to visit today. Though he visited for different purposes, it wasn't long until we lept off to my beloved topic of writing (and blogging). Jim teaches writing to prospective communicators at Emerson College and thus has an opinion or two about what works online.
Turns out, bloggerinos, that people read screens in what researcher Jakob Nielsen dubbed an F-pattern.
We skim the top lines relatively quickly, moving across the screen (left to right*).
Then work our way down the screen.
Reading a bit here.
And there.
So
if
you
want
people
to read...
Enough of that. Get the point? How did people discover this? Heat tracking studies of eye movements. Ironically, or coincidentally, or neither, we happened to have a tour of the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (yes, as in Fidelity Investments) last week, where we looked into one lab where they were tracking subjects' eye movements. Wish I'd known then what I know now. Henceforth, dear readers, watch for my posts to be very F-y.
*Is it a mirror F for the right to left languages? Jakob, where are you?
For a more detailed description of what he found, jump:
Ever wish you could have a day with no interruptions? Or even an hour? Intel has been running an experiment whereby Tuesday mornings are Quiet Time. So far, so good. People love it, according to Nathan Zeldes:
Many of the engineers are happy about the newfound thinking time, and are protecting it by pushing back on interrupters during the Tuesday AM slot. Not unexpectedly there are also some who complain that this isolation prevents them from getting answers to urgent questions during that morning… we are assuming the benefit outweighs this cost, and are waiting for the mid- and post-survey to tell us whether this is correct.
Next up for the engineers, Zero Email Friday, a bit of hyperbole it make the point:
In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group...While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice.
Imagine the possibilities if we actually starting talking to one another again. Hello.
Can we predict where ethnic and/or cultural violence will next break out? Our friend, Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complexity scientist and founder of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), is co-author of Global Pattern Formation and Ethic/Cultural Violence in the Sept 14, 2007, issue of Science, the pub of AAAS. The abstract of the article by Yaneer, May Lim, and Richard Metzler reads:
Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yygoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.
And you can listen to Yaneer's Science podcast about the article here. Congrats to Yaneer!
NECSI is hosting the week-long International Conference on Complex Systems (Oct 28-Nov 2). We're among the keynoters for the special day on networks.
Remember the Virtual Team research project, Managing virtual teams in the project environment, from the Graduate School of Economics and Business at the University of Zagreb in Croatia? We've completed our questionnaire, which we will post shortly. I encourage everyone reading to fill out yours as well. Remember: If you work with people who are more than 50 feet away, MIT Professor Tom Allen has proved that you're working in a virtual team. So what are you waiting for?
Huge cheers and high-fives to James Murrough, who's been named a National Institute of Mental Health Outstanding Resident for 2007. The notice to his colleagues at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he is a PG-3 resident, reads: "This is a highly competitive and prestigious resident award, and to be chosen reflects a tremendous effort and dedication to the science of psychiatry on James’ part."
James, a graduate of Emory University and Tufts Medical School, also celebrates his 30th birthday today, a day we here at Endless Knots remember in great detail as he is our one and only nephew. Proud and thrilled for you, as always, James, shown here with his cousins at a significant family event a few years back.
Today's Boston Globe carries a short piece by business reporter Chris Reidy that is likely to cause some CIO arm hairs to stand at attention. Employees bypassing IT departments confirms findings that we published with two business school professors in Harvard Business Review in May '04 ("Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?").
In the study, designed by USC's Marshall School of Business Professor Ann Majchrzak and UNC'S Kenan-Flagler School of Business Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship Arvind Malhotra, we found that 50% of "far-flung team" members used Instant Messaging (IM) even when their companies prohibited it. The Yankee Group, whose research is reported today, says that only one-third of the companies they surveyed offer IM. But that doesn't deter employees who regularly find the best tools for their work, regardless of corporate IT policies.
Moral of the story: CIOs, Listen Up! Pay attention to the natural resources that your employees gravitate toward. Everyone wants work to be easier and so those with the energy will seek out those tools that serve them best.
Over the years, we've received scores of requests from graduate students around the world seeking help with their research on virtual teams, networks, and collaboration. In the past two years, there has been a sharp upturn in those requests. Yesterday, we received this note from Ernest Cutuk:
I am a master's student at the Graduate School of Economics & Business University of Zagreb, Croatia conducting research on virtual teams. The thesis' title is “Managing virtual teams in the project environment".
Should you have five minutes time, I would like to ask you to answer on questions listed in the questionnaire that you will find in the attachment and send it back to me via e-mail address: ernest.cutuk@zg.htnet.hr
If you would like to receive the final result of the questionnaire, please be so kind to send me your e-mail...
If you'd like to participate in Ernest's research (we are), please read on to the jump page here to fill out his questionnaire. And...I encourage other students to send their surveys as well. If they're legit, we'll post them and we hope that you all will publish your findings back here too. Good luck, Ernest!
Continue reading "Virtual Team Questionnaire from Croatia" »
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