As many of you know I am in the process of writing a book- a field manual of how social networks can be used to facilitate getting real work done, with my personal focus being about how to support fields of entrepreneurs build their businesses together. Well… the great thing from having y’all help me out is the great leads on research that supports my thesis. Thanks to Ken and Robin for forwarding this link to me.
One of my premises of my work is for a business to be truly successful (in a climate of increasing competition) it needs to be well connected to the outside world. In fact, I write about being “open, but not vulnerable” in the book. The following article published in Time Magazine verifies this. In this article, they say:
The idea that the power of the group comes primarily from the group itself is as outdated as the rotary dial
Deborah Ancona from MIT has recently written a book called X-Teams: Teams get extroverted which goes further into the premise that I have been talking about for the last four years- to build robust ventures we need to get “the experts” out of the way, and get our organizations (and entrepreneurs) better connected. Deborah Ancona’s work verifies this.
Oh… and one note to MIT… thank you for the research you guys do. Whether Peter Senge, Deborah Ancona, Rosalin Picard, Nicholas Negroponte, or one of the many other researchers and educators that I read at MIT that shares their cutting edge insight, thank you.
that openness also ensures that the group avoids “group think” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink) and convergent thinking. Cults are an extreme example of what happens when a group only engages with its own members.