No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
Yesterday I had a difficult conversation with a stakeholder. His question was a fair one: "What is the cash return on the investment we have put into being a member of Cambridge Network?". The same question came up on Thursday lunchtime among a group of new companies that have just paid their first corporate membership fees. Everyone these days has to look at each cash outlay and ask this question. But how do we put a value on centrality?
We can point to some concrete examples where central players win out. Moscow is thought to have risen above its sister cities on the Volga because of its centrality in trading networks. Hanifan proposed in 1916 that some social capital accrues to those that support rural schools. More recently, Putnam (1995) ascribed the decline of American democracy to the loss of social capital represented by declining participation in civic organizations. Sadly for those reading this blog, he believes that the individualisation of leisure via narrowcasting technologies like the internet is to blame.
It is hard to find out who is central in a social network. Some tools exist to identify the hubs, pulsetakers, and gatekeepers in such networks, and where you have a nice clean hierarchy you can run such software over the e-mail and phone records and find the employees who are making the effort to link worlds. These are just activity input measures, but such behaviour would not persist if it was not somehow beneficial to both parties. Sadly for such analytical methods (but not for our liberties), knowledge workers defeat surveillance, despite the plans of iconic figures still present in some other Universities. Banking CIOs ruefully note that it is hard to cover the risks of insider trading with instant messaging and every other social network out there and available through mobile phones. Traditional triangulation through multiple interviews of different participants is smart if you are researching in this area. We can track e-mails logged, attendance at events, jobs and news items posted. But we still have to just go visit our members and hear their stories.
Another colleague pointed out that a major competitor was also interested in becoming a Founder. The stakeholder's reaction was an interesting one. "That's great" he said "I do run into John sometimes socially, and I think we raise one another's game". Don Corleone states "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer". Cambridge Network is forum for friends in coopetition to meet, and being there at the centre is a useful source of serendipity.
My stakeholder answered his own question by the end of lunch. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question, because he actually restated his opening gambit. "You know, if Cambridge Network did not exist, we should have to invent it" he said (paraphrasing Voltaire). He seemed reasonably happy to be there.
Comments