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On
Trust And Culture
by Dr. Karen
Otazo
Featured in the magazine "Strategy and Business"
In the 21st Century, the old
bromide is more true than ever: It’s not what you know; it’s who you
know and who knows you.
In large part, we can thank the
Internet for that these days. Despite its vast size and complexity, the
Internet has turned out to be a profoundly personal phenomenon. People
around the globe are forming networks based on every conceivable common
interest, from the serious and practical to the outright silly. In 2005,
the 80-million member networking site MySpace got more page views than
Google. And the movement is only continuing to grow.
It was only forty years ago that Dr.
Stanley Milgram amazed everyone with his “small world” experiments,
showing that a person could be connected to any given stranger in the
United States by a remarkably short chain of
I-know-someone-who-knows-someone. Those experiments, which coined the
term “six degrees of separation” were a revelation in the 1960s. Now the
concept has become so familiar that it is perhaps better known in its
movie trivia form: “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon.”
To better understand what is happening
and what it means for individuals and organizations, we turn to a
relatively new field of study: Social networking. We’ll look at four
books. First we’ll see what the ever insightful Malcolm Gladwell has to
say on the topic, in his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things
Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books/Little Brown and Company,
2000). Second, we’ll turn to an exciting new book that’s hot off the
presses: Karen Stephenson’s The Quantum Theory of Trust: Power,
Networks and the Secret Life of Organizations (Financial Times
Pearsons, 2006). Then we’ll examine the groundbreaking academic treatise
Structural Models in Anthropology by Per Hage and Frank Harary,
et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1984). And finally we’ll discuss
Robert L. Cross and Andrew Parker’s The Hidden Power of Social
Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations
(Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
Malcolm Gladwell’s book popularized the
useful and now nearly ubiquitous term “the tipping point,” which in
epidemiology describes “that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when
everything can change all at once,” Gladwell writes. He examines a
similar phenomenon in culture. Small factors, ideas or behaviors gather
momentum and become contagious. When they reach critical mass – the
tipping point – they become epidemic. Gladwell’s experience writing
about AIDS for the Washington Post, convinced him that change is about
the “law of the few.” He intuitively realized the powerful role which
some people, who spread AIDS or create buzz for the newest novel or
product, can have in moving along a social epidemic of any kind. Using
this model, he shows how the crime rate can drop or Sesame Street can
spread all over the world.
What interests us here is the motive
force that Gladwell says drives all those little things toward their
tipping point: People engaged in social networking. He identifies three
types of social networkers: Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen. Mavens
love to gather knowledge and pass it on to others. Connectors seem to
know everyone. They can get information where it needs to go. And
Salesmen are great persuaders. They are irresistibly positive and their
ideas and attitudes are infectious. When these three types of people
interact with a social network, little things can turn into big deals
with astonishing speed.
Although The Tipping Point is
often found in the business section of bookstores, it’s message is just
as applicable to sociology, history, science and other fields. Plus,
it’s simply an entertaining read.
Gladwell approaches his material in a
highly intuitive way, but in
in a New Yorker article in December of
2000, he profiled a scholar who examined the same concepts in a more
analytical and rigorous fashion. Karen Stephenson, a professor and
business consultant, studied social networks within organizations to
understand how information and influence flow in those settings.
By charting the flow of information,
she showed how organizations are evolving from command and control
structures, past the trendy world of networks to a strange new world of
networked institutions, paying homage to Friedman’s spot-on prophecy
that the world is both small and flat. She maps a pattern completely
unlike the traditional organizational chart. She represented each person
as a dot and drew lines between them to show paths of communication. In
this way, she showed how information really flows through a system. At
the time, she used her insights to help IBM create a new business on it
and companies better organize their physical workspaces to accommodate
and encourage social networking. Now that she has put her valuable
insights into book form, with The Quantum Theory of Trust,
she may be the Margaret Mead of social networking.
Stephenson has a background in quantum
chemistry and mathematics but earned her doctorate in anthropology,
studying the social networks found among Gibbons. The combination led
her to study anthropology through a bio-statistician lens. She then
spent ten years as a professor in the management school of UCLA before
going out on her own, only to be invited to teach at her alma mater,
Harvard, in the Graduate School of Design. Thus, over thirty years, she
has devoted her life to culture and design, both of which have
intricacies that are invisible to the untrained eye.
Her social networking studies show that
information follows through and around certain archetypes. Some people
are Hubs; information pathways radiate all around them. They know many
people and others seek them out. But Stephenson warns that such people
are not necessarily sophisticated in directing the flow of information.
If you want to keep a secret, she says, don’t tell Hubs since they may
be naďve in their attempts to make connections. Gatekeepers, on the
other hand, are expert at managing information flow. They know whom to
tell what and when. Gatekeepers are an indispensable resource in
building effective social networks. A less visible, but equally
important archetype is the Pulsetaker. Pulsetakers are connected through
a variety of networks but choose to STAY below the radar. They are keen
observers of the people and trends around them and often make excellent
mentors and coaches. Machiavelli proved himself the ultimate Pulsetaker
when he described the Medici court.
As Stephenson puts it, “Hubs
know the most people; Gatekeepers know the right people,
and Pulsetakers know the most people who know the right people.”
Professor Stephenson adds that Pulsetakers make some of the best change
agents.
However, she admits, one rarely finds a
pure archetype in real life. She sees Gladwell’s descriptions of
Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen as useful hybrids of her archetypical
Hubs, Gatekeepers and Pulsetakers.
Stephenson Gladwell
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Hub-Pulsetaker |
Connectors |
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Gatekeeper-Pulsetaker |
Maven |
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Hub-Gatekeeper |
Salesmen |
Used with permission
2006 Dr. Karen Stephenson
For her, Gladwell’s Connectors are Hub-Pulsetakers.
They combine the buoyant enthusiasm of Hubs with the finesse of
Pulsetakers. They enjoy knowing a large number of people, without
feeling obligated to form deep relationships with all of them. And they
are quick to use their Pulsetaking skills to find opportunities to bring
members of their network together.
Mavens are Gatekeeper-Pulsetakers. They
may not know quite as many people, but they are more invested in the
people they do know. They lead softly and often imperceptibly by
helping, teaching and enquiring.
Salesman are Hub-Gatekeepers. They are
masters of interpersonal communication, picking up on subtle cues to
better connect with their listeners. They get information across, but
also seem to put their listeners under a spell. It is very difficult to
say “no” to such a person.
Finally, Stephenson identifies one more
important position. Some people combine all three of her other
roles: Hub, Gatekeeper and Pulsetaker. She calls them “Strange
Attractors”. These individuals are often unaware of the reach of their
influence, but they can be a “powerful force for good or evil,” she
says. She regularly finds them in organizations and is relieved they are
a limited resource. Once identified, she says they “should be
sparingly sprinkled into any recipe for change.”
Stephenson gained her precise
perspective from her early scientific training and in part by working
and studying for years with the deeply reflective anthropologist Per
Hage and Frank Harary, a practical applied graphics expert. Our next
book, Hage and Harary’s Structural Models in Anthropology. is the
forerunner of rigorous social network analysis as we know it.
The book approaches network theory as a
continuation of the work of structural anthropologist Claude Levi
Strauss, who was looking for the basic unit of kinship, just as there is
a basic unit of speech, the phoneme, in the field of linguistics. Per
Hage was a traditional anthropologist who liked to use stories to show
relationships, while Frank Harary is known for his development of
approaches and ideas in graphic theory. Their work pulled together
articles and research to move the social network community inexorably
toward identifying a basic unit of relationship as “the relationship”,
rather than the anthropological view of kinship as the basic unit
of relationship.
They showed the way for how to use
graphic techniques in social network analysis. They did not intend for
the technique to “race ahead” of the theory; rather their focus was on
the fusion of economics, sociology, anthropology and logic. They used
“cultural” clues to represent the smallest particle of a work
organization so that readers could see and decode the cultural
particles, which is a bit like decoding the Da Vinci Code as Dr.
Stephenson would say.
In their overview of the history of
structuralism in Anthropology, the authors used famous studies from
Margaret Mead to Claude Levi Strauss and the characters in famous novels
to portray relationships among and between people, food, bodily fluids,
rituals and reciprocity. Whether it’s the kinship roles in Brazil or the
role of women, chains of relationships in networks trump individual
relationships for clout and influence.
It’s a bit like the current US
advertisement showing a network of people behind someone with a mobile
phone. Hage and Harary show that it’s the power of the network and the
group. It’s a fascinating book if you enjoy history and the process of
creating visual representation of concepts like organizational design
and analysis.
Although it is out of print, this brief
but dense book is well worth tracking down. When you read through it,
you will start to understand the power of graphic representations of
social connections and gain a new respect for what happens in the social
network analysis of organizations.
For a more hands-on look at how social
networking functions in organizations and how to better manage it, check
out The Hidden Power of Social Networks, by Rob Cross and
Andrew Parker. Their book is an in-the-trenches bunch of tips to
understand how social networks, often invisible to management, can save
or scuttle an organization.
The important networking roles Cross
and Parker identify include Central Connectors, Unsung Heroes,
Bottlenecks, Boundary Spanners and Information Brokers (borrowed from
the early work of David Krackhardt, Tom Allen, Karen Stephenson and
Malcolm Gladwell), as well as various types of Peripheral People. They
examine factors that contribute to or inhibit social connections, like
physical proximity, time invested in relationships, length of time
known, expertise gaps, network preferences, and organization positions.
The book is essentially a how-to guide
with lists. Using examples from different types of businesses, the
authors encourage managers to look past the formal hierarchies they have
put in place and to analyze the social networks that actually control
the flow of power and information in their companies. Cross and Parker
provide simple tools for that analysis and suggest practical methods for
doing one’s own problem solving. Knowing about networks and
organizational analysis, leaders are warned to avoid blanket approaches
and pinpoint the roles and players who have leverage in their
organizations. Although it lacks the broader and deeper view of the
other three works we’ve examined, this is a good, practical book to give
to first-line supervisors and managers to help them understand how their
networks function.
In different ways, the four books, with
their unique insights and guidance, help explain the complex metaphor of
organizational success as represented by companies like General Electric
and BMW. GE, one of the last century’s most successful organizations, is
off to a great start in this century. Much has been written about the
leadership of Jack Welch, but what has had less media time is the
organization’s extensive reliance on social networks long in place. GE
sustains organizational success decade after decade with different CEOs,
thanks in great part to its fostering and effective use of those
networks.
GE is an organization that knows its
culture. The leadership knows and understands the culture’s strengths
and weaknesses, the portfolio’s capabilities, and the reach and strength
of its human resource network across all businesses and functions.
Within the culture are protected core values that are nourished and
promulgated among every incoming generation of employees. The behaviors
and performance requirements are clear and practiced from the top of the
organization to every level below.
Therefore the management of directional
tipping points such as the recent commitment to eco-imagination resound
quickly and efficiently, setting a major organization in a new direction
supported inherently and completely by its extraordinarily connected
networks and functions. This is only the most recent example of a
strategic tipping point shifting the cultural energy of a major company
toward its next success agenda. Stephenson’s theory elegantly explains
how a company like GE could succeed over generations of leaders. She
points out that “networks, more than hierarchy and more than markets,
make culture what it is and what it can be.” (Chapter 5 in manuscript).
GE has done a great job of creating
social networks through its management development curriculum. Its more
than 60 year history of management development programs like Financial
Management, HR Management, Manufacturing Management, Executive
Development Course or Management Development Course at Crotonville, etc.
have created informal networks that get things done. These programs
attract the top cadre of people who become the leaders of businesses
over time. What you become at GE is a function of who you knew when. The
transfer of people across divisions and functions has also kept
networking alive and robust. Plus, there is the annual ritual of the
senior management meeting every January in Boca Raton. The value of
networking at this major event is well known. So in GE, a big measure of
knowing you’ll “make it” is “When do I get to go to Boca Raton?”
Karen Stephenson talks about how trust
fuels networks and then how feed and sustain a culture. Networks are a
tool of culture at GE. The GE culture is fed by the shared values of
its members. The company’s selection process is about seeking people who
fit the GE mold. And the de-selection process is about ridding the
organization of those who don’t fit. “Session C” at GE, the discussion
of the characteristics of top-level executives, is a way of ensuring
that the folks who don’t fit the culture leave while the networks
support the rest.
Essentially, networks of trust at work
are ways of keeping a company moving forward through the sharing of
information, confidence, knowledge, best practices. An organization’s
ability to use and promote such networks is key to its success, though
it’s a key that is often overlooked. It is easy to look at GE and see
only a charismatic figure like Jack Welch, but in reality it’s the ebb
and flow of information and trust shared by a complex web of people that
keeps a company on course and nourished by a thriving culture. The four
books we have examined, taken together, provide a roadmap to
understanding those networks. Networks can be difficult to see, but
once you spot them, you’ll never look at an organizational chart -- or
ever think of “culture” -- the same way again.
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