Just some notes for today: If you have been reading the site through a browser, and not an RSS feed, you may have noticed that we’ve been changing quite a bit. There’s a great deal left to do, so please do email me if you see anything strange happening. The goal is to make it much easier for you to …
Your Idea “Craves Light, Likes Crowds, Thrives on Crossbreeding, Grows Better For Being Stepped On” (LeGuin)
Ursula K. LeGuin, the noted science fiction author, uses her stories to talk about issues of the day. What’s interesting is when she throws out a side comment that is loaded with great stuff. In The Dispossessed (1974), LeGuin talks about why people need to be colocated to spur cross-disciplinary “open source” conversations that drive innovation: It was a revelation, …
Using Technology To Network Is Not New
UPDATE 2015: Originally a quick note in September 2004, this was just a quick thought about social networks at the time. I think I was shortsighted: obviously social networking systems can be used to build social capital, too. In “INTERNETWORKING (MIT Technology Review, April 2004, pp. 44-49), Michael Fitzgerald quotes Visible Path’s Antony Brydon as saying, “Eighty to ninety percent …
Requisitely Organize to Build Social Capital at Work
Can Elliott Jaques’s theory of Requisite Organization and trust-building hierarchies mesh with Francis Fukuyama’s social capital arguments regarding trust and trust-building within a culture? According to Jaques in the introduction to Requisite Organization: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organization and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century (1996) the aim of requisite organization theory of management structure is: to develop …
Social Capital and Requisite Organization Should Get Married
There’s something missing in Jaques’s Requisite Organization theory, which is described in the ideas of social networks. There is something missing in social network theory that is described in RO theory. Interestingly, both “solutions to the ills of contemporary Western civilization” are socially based, rather than psychological.