Welcome to week 8 screen-side chats. This week I'm going to, like the prior weeks, post responses I taped in years past because some of the questions I posted are ones that I've kind of answered relatively thoroughly in years past. And given my time is limited, I'm going to try to address other kinds of questions that either you mentioned or ones that I'm inferring from the forums, postings that you've had, that might be helpful for you to hear and have elaborated. In addition, I'm kind of drawing on the Stanford students here who have had questions about network forms of organizing and management as well, so I'll try to elaborate some of that. So I'm going to extrapolate away from the questions somewhat, not answering a particular thread question, but more what I was inferring from particular posts across a variety of threads that I thought it would be good for me to articulate some kind of characterization of. Now so, the first screen-side chat I want to give you is really about network management. And I think it was kind of something I wanted to answer because I read Steven Dowell's thread which I thought was great. And he asked can you be an effective manager if you're not networked? He cites this article and then he goes on to say do organizations pay enough attention to how effective a networker that you are when assessing performance? And he liked the example of the hidden talent, the great networker who contributes to the success of the company, but under the radar of traditional performance assessment methods. And he says, does the networked organization need a new approach to performance management because of this? So it's clear like, there are a variety of scholars that we can draw on to study networked managers who do a good job of networking. And I think Ron Bird at Chicago does a great job with that kind of research and literature, talking about how managers who assume particular kind of brokerage positions as well as kind of join certain cliques, trusted local networks. The combination of the two makes them more successful in mentoring people as well as kind of climbing up the ranks and accessing new kinds of information. So he's done a variety of things on that and I think he's a great person to look at. His work is, in terms of understanding network managers, at least in terms of how to position yourself and how to understand networks that you're in. There is some confusion with that question though that's implicit and I don't think it's Steven's fault, I think it's my fault to some degree because I present two lectures this week. One on how to analyze networks from this kind of perspective of being embedded in networks and trying to get an advantage through them and interpersonal networks. And it kind harkens back to organizational learning, and the kind of networks we talked about within firms and between firms, a little bit of that sort. This second set of lectures this week were different. They weren't about network analysis of organizations or even that particular kind of management of interpersonal networks that Ron Bird and others talk about. It's more about how to accomplish a interorganizational network form of a particular style. So the network form of organizing is distinctive as a theory, and it's an interorganizational theory that I want to kind of focus on a little bit more in this kind of response to Steven. So in some way I'm saying what the network form of organizational management is in this response now. And I think you have to shift to a different unit of analysis, so for a network form of organization to be accomplished, the managerial effort is all at the interorganizational level. You're coordinating organizations, you're creating a managerial organization to coordinate all these different service providers. You're trying to select partners to form an alliance to form this kind of provision as a network and you're trying to make sure that they're complimentary, that they don't have inconsistencies and competing interests that you don't bring two competitors in, you know, the enemy of my enemy, as organizations to fight each other, with each other, in your network of service provision. So, what you look for is a division of labor to some extent, and you try to create this network that provides a better service than could have been accomplished on its own and so it better serves clients. But it also serves these organizations better because if they had remained specialist small organizations to some extent they wouldn't have gone as far without this network alliance. So the kind of example I always think of when I think of a network form of organization, I don't know if this is true for you, is in the United States we have health care partnerships and providers and alliances, right. So you have different practices form a partnership or a group and you also have different insurance providers that ally with the different kind of groups, health care provision groups. And what this ends up being is some kind of network form of organizing. Those practices within a group, of course, don't compete with each other. You don't have a practice of neonatology, or neurology, you don't have two of those, typically, in the same group unless you have such a large client load that you can do that. Otherwise, you have all kinds of problems within the network. In addition, I think the economies of scale for an insurer are such that they find it attractive. But the idea here is, not all these little tangents I'm taking, but the alliance of provision is something that clients like me can go to this website for my physician and I can find specialists, I can be referred, I can see everything there, I can see the different insurance providers. It's all there, but there are many organizations that have compiled their information into one kind of foundation or one kind of alliance. And it's that kind of thing that I acquire that is of value added, I think, because of the network. Same thing could be thought of was really specialized firm. So for example, in class today the Stanford students mentioned how do we help impoverished individuals when all of the organizations said do that are very specialized. How do we coordinate them. And then they came up with some ideas that were interesting in terms of forming an alliance across those or a network form of organization where all these specialists come together, share their information. They have a division of labor on what they will focus on, but by creating a common portal for people who are going through poverty to come to and search through these things and be referred across them, that the provision of services is much more dynamic, much more salient to the user and they get many more clients, etc., etc.. And they provide a better quality of service. That would be the goal. So you want to, as a manager, develop this kind of family, this kind of partnership network, and you want to establish that there's some added benefit from belonging to the network that you wouldn't get otherwise. That if you can kind of manage that to occur, that's wonderful. And sometimes that means you need to pick your partners carefully, you need openness of information that you share across these, so you aren't scooping each other, or suddenly outcompeting someone that you weren't in the market in the same niche with. You need to manage complementarities. And you might have to give up a little bit of authority so that there's some kind of collective governance to that partnership group or that alliance or that network. And in that way, there's some stakes. So if one of your partners falls short of achievement that fits the standard of that alliance, that you can replace them without jeopardizing the collective trust. Does that make sense? And I know a lot of you mentioned trust here in particular dyadic relations, and even throughout the firm, but here it's interorganizational trust. And it's quite distinctive, and I think if I can get everybody to kind of refocus a little bit away from the networking aspect of individuals within firms and managers trying to deal or have knowledge about the interpersonal networks in the firm, which is great, it's important, but it's not a networked form of organizing, which is in the environment. Which is where you subcontracting and contracting and you have organizations that coordinate. That their whole job is to collect data and coordinate and share it with all these individuals, individual firms, and to make sure as an alliance or as a network that they stay integrated and keep providing those services. So, it's distinct. And the managerial effort is quite distinct from that of an interpersonal manager on the shop floor of a factory, or in a firm where you have partners like a law firm or the like. It's very different from that. It's more at this interorganizational novel. So I just wanted to make the first post about that and that the managerial prescriptions are at that level. And hopefully that helps, gives some clarity to quite a few of you out there who were kind of maybe scratching your head across the two sets of lectures I did this week. Thanks.
