October 2004 Archives

More from HBS Working Knowledge

But there was a third set of communicators who employed a breathtakingly simple and successful procedure that we term the relationship-raising approach. Before making a request for change from their partner, they merely made mention of their existing relationship. They might say, "You know, we've been together for a while now" or "We're a couple; we share the same goals." Then, they'd deliver their appeal: "So, I'd appreciate it if you could find a way to change your stand on this one." Or, in the most streamlined version of the relationship-raising approach, these individuals simply incorporated the pronouns "we," "our," and "us" into their request.

The outcome? The relationship partners exposed to this technique shifted significantly in the requested direction (Oriña, Wood, and Simpson, 2002).

The first set of communicators in the experiment used coercive techniques and the second used purely rational arguments.

Read the whole article here - What Lovers Tell Us About Persuasion

Piers Young with a great idea:

What if, at the company you worked in, you had a system similar to del.icio.us, which bookmarked items of interest etc. And on that system, rather than having just "and 42 others" as the cue to who else found something interesting, you had "and 42 others(2 marketing, 3 HR, 7 IT Support, 30 other)". Any obvious cons to this?

I couldn't think of anything really bad about it - might be some resistance by people not wanting to share, but that's going to happen anyway.

It would be nice to have a more general application that allows ad-hoc definition of "groups" - ie the company social bookmark list would be one group, and you could belong to many others.

And I guess you could use del.icio.us right now for this if you use a unique not-likely-to-be-used-accidentally taq for your company/group bookmarks - something like zz90adj. Not very easy to remember, but what you want here is the posting action to automatically embed this tag into your delicious post.

From the SOCNET mailing list - Wendi Backler posted a query asking for case studies and articles on the impact of SNA on organisational performance - lots of responses received, which she summarised and posted to the list. So useful I thought it would be worth reposting here.

• Balkundi, P., & Harrison, D.A., Networks, Leaders, and Time in Teams: Connections to Viability and Performance.
  Request a copy of the paper from Prasad at: bprasad@psu.edu
• Annotated bibliography by Brass on how networks affect performance:
  http://www.analytictech.com/networks/Brass_consequences.doc
• Cross, Rob and Andrew Parker, The Hidden Power of Social Networks:  Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, June 2004, 304 pages
• Cross, Rob - Organizational Network Analysis homepage
  http://www.robcross.org/sna.htm
• Davies, Rick has a section of his website at www.mande.co.uk which is devoted to this topic (www.mande.co.uk/networks.htm), and wrote a paper last year on "network perspectives in the evaluation of development aid", to which there is a link on this section of the website
• Gloor, Peter, et al - Innovative Collaborative Knowledge Networks homepage
  Recently did some (still informal) work, accessible here - http://www.ickn.org/html/ckn_app.htm
• Joshi, Apama, Labiance, Giusseppe, and Caliguirui, Paula M., Getting Along Long Distance:  Understanding Conflict in a Multinational Team Through Network Analysis, Journal of World Business 37 (2002) 277-284.
• Krackhardt, David and Hanson, Jeffrey R., Informal Networks:  The Company Behind the Chart, Harvard Business Review, July 1, 1993
• Lazega, Emmanuel (2001), The Collegial Phenomenon: The Social Mechanisms of Cooperation Among Peers in a Corporate Law Partnership, NY: Oxford University Press
• Lazega, Emmanuel (2002), "Networks, Distributed Knowledge and Economic Performance: Evidence from Corporate Legal Services", in Jean Gadrey and Faïz Gallouj (eds.), Productivity, Innovation and Knowledge in Services, Cheltenham : Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Lazega, Emmanuel (1999), "Generalized Exchange and Economic Performance", in Corporate Social Capital and Liabilities, Roger Leenders and Shaul Gabbay (eds), Boston: Kluwer
• Lazega, Emmanueal, Lise Mounier, Rafaël Stofer and Alain Tripier (forthcoming) , "Discipline scientifique et discipline sociale: Réseaux de conseil, apprentissage collectif et innovation dans la recherche française sur le cancer (1997-1999)", Recherche sociologique, Brussels (Belgium). (in french)
• Levine, Sheen S., The Strength of Performative Ties: Network Exchange in a Knowledge Intensive Firm, Dissertation Draft, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2004 e-mail: levine@management.wharton.upenn.edu
• Mizruchi, Mark S. and Linda Brewster Stearns. 2001. "Getting Deals Done:  The Use of Social Networks in Bank Decision-Making," American Sociological Review 66:647-671.
• Oh, Hongseok, Chung, Myung-Ho And Labianca, Giuseppe; Group Social Capital And Group Effectiveness: The Role Of Informal Socializing Ties, 10/7/2004, Forthcoming, Academy of Management Journal's special issue on Building Effective Networks
• Schrott, Gregor - website www.gregor-schrott.de has some articles which may be relevant
• Springall, Lille, Top Management Teams' Mental Models Of Interorganisational Social Networks And Strategic Decision-Making,
• Snijders, Tom - website http://ppswmm.ppsw.rug.nl/~steglich/dynamics/ includes research on the development & application of statistical methodology for analyzing data on the simultaneous dynamics of social networks and individual characteristics, which can be can be used  to study performance on a micro level.
• Tang, Jeffrey and Prof. Yang  (National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan) "Team Structure and Team Performance in IS Development: A Social Network Perspective," Information & Management, Vol. 41, No. 3, Jan. 2004, pp. 335-349.
• Teten, David with Donna Fisher and Scott Allen, "The Five Keys to Building Business Relationships Online
  Book due out on building a powerful social network, face to face and online.  See http://www.OnlineBusinessNetworks.com.  The book is about how the individual businessperson can leverage social software to become more effective.
• Ahuja's works (i.e., 2000) and Tsai & Ghoshal's stuff (i.e., Academy of Management, 41(4)1998) which look at about social capital and social networks as they pertain to innovation.  Gabbay and Leenders (2001?) also put out a book on social capital within organizations.

Interesting article from K@W [Knowledge @ Wharton]. David Bell, a marketing professor examined nearly 4 years of data from netgrocer.com.

Bell's study found a significant "neighborhood effect," with a 50% increase in the base rate of consumers trying an online retailer's services once they talked about or otherwise observed its use locally. "The unique market context of the Internet retailer raises important and so far unstudied questions, especially the fundamental issue of the role existing customers play in recruiting or influencing potential customers," says Bell. "Our study addresses a new and important phenomenon: the space-time evolution of trial decisions for an online retailer, and we find that it's not the location of the store relative to the customers that's important, it's the location of the existing customer relative to potential customers."

"I plotted over time and space how these customers evolved and grew," Bell says. "What we saw was the thing spreading out like a disease. When we started to look at these patterns in more detail, what we found was that the new customers were not appearing randomly on the map. They were appearing in places that were contiguous to areas that already had customers."

Although geographical proximity is the key factor, it would be interesting to see, considering we're talking about online retail, whether closeness in other networks is a factor.

Social Contagion and Trial on the Internet: Evidence from Online Grocery Retailing: PDF 4MB

From the "If Six Apart are using it, then it's probably good enough..." dept.

Started to play with Instiki last night and today - and it is really is easy to get up and running, which is a big big plus - the fact that is relies on nothing except Ruby helps.

But anyway, I'm using Instiki, initially at least, not to manage my Personal Knowledge [or Personal Information, or Personal Data], but as a wireframing tool for an intranet project I'm working on here.

So far, the results are promising enough for me to continue using it - features like being able to include other pages mean that navbars and other bits of common content are really easy to implement. It's all real and clickable, and you can style anything you want using CSS, which is useful for distinguising content blocks.

It's not all loved up here though - the addition of templates would be very useful [and also solidify this into a very lightweight CMS], and although you can theoretically "publish" a non-editable site, I can get it to work for more than one page.

But - very very promising !

Mena Trott and some other of the other people at Six Apart are blogging about what tools they use.

What I found particularly interesting is that they all seem to be using wikis for collaboration, and [I'm guessing] Personal Knowledge Management and Personal Information Management [whatever the difference is ;) ]. My assumption is that they started off with using their own tools, ie MT or Typepad, for this purpose and found them lacking.

So, does this strengthen the positioning of weblogs as a tool/medium for communication as opposed to action ? Also, given that most of Six Apart seem to be hooked on wiki, is it likely that we'll start to see wiki features in Six Apart's product lineup ?