Building Great Networks

I attended a meeting for the Innovation special interest group of the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP) up at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts.  As you might guess, the session focused on ways that alliances and partnerships can improve innovation.  The session had a very nice mix of folks from the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare, and technology, as well as, consultants, and leaders from academia. 

One of the key premises of the event is the idea that the days of the vertically integrated organization that characterized the industrial age are over, along with the company test labs that drove their innovation.  AT&T’s Bell Labs, IBM’s Watson Research Center, and XEROX’s PARC all are iconic labs that represent some of the era’s leading innovators.  As those vertical mass production corporations have evolved, so has today’s innovation laboratory, which is no longer contained within a single organization. 

I was lucky, having grown up in the Princeton area to become involved with the David Sarnoff Labs at a pretty young age, and got to know some of the people that helped develop some really pivotal consumer electronics technology, such as the VCR and lots of hi-fi audio technology.  Much later on, I wound up working for two different parts of the Bell Labs legacy, Telcordia and Lucent.

I always enjoyed watching the presentations from the advanced research teams, because first, and foremost, most of them have really good senses of humor and put on killer presentations.  The second point was that it always felt like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future.  The painful reality was that most of the really, really cool research stuff was pretty far away from the pedestrian commercial world of selling stuff and making this year’s numbers that I live in. 

I think that the focus on strategic alliances to drive innovation is right on the money, although probably closer to the more tactical "while I still have a job" couple of year range, as opposed to the more realistic 20 years that it takes for most really revolutionary designs to find a commercial marketplace. 

On the surface, it looks like pretty straightforward wizardry.  The company gives the CIO less money and expects increases in overall performance and productivity. He is expected to deliver complicated solutions that people can benefit from immediately without any training. The King doesn’t understand the magic that it takes to make things happen, but has faith that the CIO has the arcane knowledge and skill to make it happen.

And largely, the CIO has been able to deliver the magic.  As always, people are happier with the idea that it all happens with a flash of insight that comes from a secret store of knowledge.  I guess that’s nice to believe. 

There is some truth in the idea of a special store of knowledge, but it doesn’t come as a gift, and it really isn’t a secret.  It comes from constantly learning about new and different approaches and testing them out to figure out which ones work, and which ones don’t.  I think that deep inside there are a couple of traits that help make some CIOs successful.  The first is tremendous intellectual curiosity.  There needs to be a genuine passion for exploring new ways of innovating that drives them to actually invest the time and energy to see "what happens if we do this?"

The other part is a bit harder to discuss.  It is that little "pilot light" that keeps the curiosity and drive going in the face of really tough challenges, unpleasant surprises, and multiple false starts.  It takes something special to take on a project after it has blown up in your face before. It isn’t simply curiosity, experience, or intellect that will make someone raise their hand and commit to doing something that hasn’t been done before and looks really suspect.  I’m not talking about ignoring risks, rather the ability to look at the whole situation, recognize the need  along with the risks, and then find the faith that the talent and resources to see the job through will reveal themselves. 

The faith that they will be given what they need to do what needs to be done, in spite of the evidence of their experience and intellect, I think is the gift that separates the truly exceptional leader.

It is so much easier to think that there is a single right career path that is best for everyone. It would mean though, that we all develop the same way, have the same goals, and that things won’t change over time.  That hasn’t been my experience, however. We all learn differently, mature emotionally on different timelines, and sometimes things happen that force plans to change. 

Most of us have an image in our minds of the ideal career path that includes going away to college, getting a degree in four years, then having a successful career and making lots of money.  Perhaps you then go on to graduate school, get an advanced degree and have an even better career and make even more money. Either way, it is all pretty much sorted out by your mid-twenties and you get on with it.

It didn’t work out that way for me, and I suspect that it doesn’t work out that way for most people, but we still keep the image in our minds of the "right path".  I’m not sure that every seventeen year old is ready for college straight out of high school. Many of the kids that are ready for college cannot afford to go off and live on the campus of their dreams.  It is also true that things happen and young adults have family responsibilities that force them to make trade-offs between earning a living today and investing in their long term future.  I suspect that there may be a strong correlation between the percentage of kids that are able to complete college in four years and the stability of their home environment.  If anyone has been involved in studies showing percentages of college graduates with two parents at home, I would love to see it. 

As a society, we have tremendous untapped potential that we can leverage if we can help provide the tools for these people to finish their educations.  Information technology can provide us with an efficient way to support a learners that need to adapt their curriculum and pace to accommodate the need to balance job, family, and education.  They also demand more and benefit more from their education by being able to put it to more immediate use.

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he though, “Surely the Lord is in the place, and I was not aware of it.”

I’m working on a couple of different projects that use social networking technology to help create value. The idea behind social networking can be as simple as ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. What has changed in the last couple of years is that technology and computing processing power is catching up to the point where we can model those types of relationships, even on very large scales.

One of the projects that I’m working on is the Birds of a Feather project at the Lehigh Enterprise Systems Center, the other is more commercially oriented, working with a network service provider to use social networking information to create more value for their customers.

One of the business values that social networking may be able to deliver is reduced fraud. If we have good modeling of communities within a network, we should be able to detect transactions that don’t fit the typical profile. We all see some fraud management activity from our credit card companies, for example, we may be called because a dollar amount is out of the ordinary, or the location or method seems wrong. Social networking could provide us with a new dimension for this.

Probing around this area, led to some interesting discussions regarding trust and social networks. Mike Catalano, who is an expert in wireless technology at Booz Allen Hamilton is working on a project for the Gates Foundation, and was starting to consider the elasticity of trust in a social network. How far can it be extended? Hank Korth, a faculty member at Lehigh had worked on real time fraud management back when he was at Bell Labs. He thought that trust should be another attribute that we look at and capture when we build social network maps.

If you think about examples, I’m sure that you may have family networks where you have trust in something even though it may have travelled through 4 or 5 people, while there are others, such as business deals that you may only trust as far as “a friend of a friend”.

My thoughts are that in addition to weak links and strong links, and direction, frequency, and duration of communications, we need to think about adding a trust attribute to the equation.

I am wondering whether trust can be extracted passively from a network by analyzing data, or you would need to establish and capture trust separately, but then model using the value.

Please let me know what your thoughts.

Chrys Lindop is one of the finest audio engineers that I have ever worked with. He is one of the very few that have the combination of excellent technical, creative, and people skills. Chrys has worked with The Pretenders, David Byrne, Stevie Wonder, Ry Cooder, and way too many other acts to mention. He remains an in-demand engineer for the serious artists that recognize that the sound system is part of the performance and requires as much creative talent as every other aspect of the show.

I was intrigued to hear that he had become involved with a project in Glasgow that is working with the disabled community to put on performances.

I had the opportunity to have dinner in NYC with Chrys and Gordon Dougall, who is the creative director at Sounds of Progress. They were in New York as they are looking to expand its borders and bring the program to the United States. It’s a bit hard to capture the flavor of it all in a post, but I’ll do my best.

Sounds of Progress is a charity that trains and assists disabled people to develop musical abilities to a professional standard. They teach and bring world class production values and standards to their productions. As it turns out, for example being in a wheelchair isn’t really much of a hardship to someone that needs to sit behind a mixing console. Nor is being blind an insurmountable obstacle for a talented singer.

Sounds of Progress is an inclusive program that challenges everyone involved to produce great work. It is hard to discuss these communities without slipping into some euphemisms that really do everyone a disservice. Sounds of Progress takes talented people who are blind, autistic, physically and mentally handicapped and works with them to make great art. Unlike many well intentioned local performances where people are given roles beyond their reach, the SOP productions strike the right balance of challenging people to overcome their personal barriers while keeping the entire production focused on the quality of the performance.

The results have spoken for themselves. The quality of the productions has brought audiences, sponsors, and industry professionals and the local community all together wanting to be part of the project. They have moved into a larger facility in Glasgow with additional production facilities, and have launched multiple performing bands, as well as, the theatrical productions.

At the core of it all is a commitment to that very precious little piece of something that reminds us that we are all connected. It is the virtue that challenges each of us to hold ourselves to a higher standard, which is at its heart, and act of kindness.

They are looking for a US performance company to work with to begin work on new projects. If you are interested in learning more about the project, send me a note.

We had a great kickoff meeting tonight for the Birds of a Feather project that we are working on at Enterprise Systems Center at Lehigh University. It was a solid evening, we had a great mix of the business and academic communities. We had people from Air Products, Northrop-Grumman, PeopleForce, and dozens of other businesses. The idea behind Birds of a Feather is to do a study focused on the business value that can be created through establishing collaborative networks, and the tools that can support the transition to it.

My presentation was focused on the value that can be delivered to a business by expanding its network to include an extended collaborative community. How can the value be measured? If you are interested, send me a note and I’ll send you the presentation slides, there are only 7 of them and they are very early stages. I am looking for as much good input and feedback as possible.

Now this got my motor running! Sam and Max are very, very cool. Evidently Telltale games is working on a project. I had been disappointed by the Simpson’s game, and after a while, Super Mario Galaxy. Nothing has really got me going enough to invest that much time playing around.

Sam and Max would do it though. I was first turned on to them by Dave Lewty, a dear friend as a PC game.

Any serious attempt to create a system to help drive sales growth ought to start where sales “come from”, which is with customers. It is also probably worth mentioning that customers are always actually people. Even when the check is coming from a Fortune 500 corporation, the customer that made a decision to buy something was an actual person.

The full quote that I took the title from was by one of the Marriott brothers, who said “Motivate them, train them, care about them, and make winners out of them… they’ll treat the customers right. And if customers are treated right, they’ll come back.” It’s a great focus for building a successful business of any kind.

All too often when technology, management, and process analysis come together, we wind up with phrases like CRM, Contact Management, pipeline, funnel, quotas, retirements and so on. The phrase Sales Force Automation is an industry standard one, but I like to start any analysis of these systems with a reminder that at the center of it all should be customers and ways to make sure that we treat them right.