Top News

Making Networks Work

	Author Steve Denning.

Fall Network Roundtable sparks innovative, actionable ideas.

How can you persuade people to change? How can you build trust? How can you get people to work together? These were among the topics that brought more than 200 leading scholars and practitioners to a meeting of the Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia on Nov. 8 and 9, 2006.

Steve Denning, author of The Springboard; Squirrel Inc.; and The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, told the group that the answer to such questions lies neither in high technology nor in hard analytics. Instead, he promoted the ancient art of storytelling.

“Analysis isn’t distorted by the feelings or the hopes or the fears of the analysts; analysis gets us relentlessly to the bottom line,” he told the group. “Yet the very strength of analysis—its heartlessness—can be a drawback when it comes to communicating with human beings.”

He later pointed out that people think in stories, talk in stories, and even dream in stories. “If you want to understand what’s going on in an organization, you need to listen to the stories,” he said. “Moreover, if you want to get anything done in an organization, you need to know how to use the story to move people.”

Roundtable Director and McIntire Professor Rob Cross said that talks such as Denning’s helped to inspire dialogue on topics ranging from the nuts and bolts of conducting network analysis to ways that networks can help grow revenue and enhance organizations’ creativity and innovation.

The Network Roundtable is a consortium of corporations and organizations that seek to effectively apply research on network applications to critical management issues. In addition to attending the biannual Roundtable meetings, member organizations gain access to cutting-edge research and proprietary software.

Rapid Growth
“I’m amazed by the momentum this group has gained and by the speed with which it’s done so,” Cross says. “We continued to grow membership and ended 2006 with commitments from 75 top organizations to participate in the Roundtable’s work.” Although the group’s explosive growth has presented some challenges, Cross says, it has also led to “some amazing extensions of the ideas and research.”

Cross says that the Roundtable’s success can be attributed, in part, to good timing. Network ideas are really “‘hot’ right now,” he says. “They’re seen as highly relevant to businesses’ strategic needs.” Additionally, Cross says, “in contrast to traditional research centers, I think our approach has been much more on applied research issues. This focus on executive concerns—as opposed to pure scholarship—has had a real impact on both the research progress and corporate involvement.” The Roundtable, he points out, is designed to create a working dialogue between academic business research and corporate entities, which seek actionable solutions to pressing real-world problems.

Cross notes that Roundtable-related research appeared in numerous journals during 2006, including Harvard Business Review; Sloan Management Review; and McKinsey Quarterly. Cross’ network-related work has also been cited in commercial publications such as BusinessWeek; Fortune; and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Outstanding Participants
Not surprisingly, fall 2006’s meeting included workshops led by representatives from leading corporations and government agencies—including McKinsey, Halliburton, Merck, and the Defense Intelligence Agency—as well as from top academic institutions, including Stanford University and Columbia University. Says Cross of the Roundtable’s corporate-academic partnership, “It’s rare to see the business world and the world of business academics really synchronize in the way that they do through the Roundtable.”

“Fresh, Actionable Ideas”
Cross says that although the growth of the Roundtable is exciting, it’s the fact that he’s created a forum for the generation and sharing of fresh, actionable ideas that’s most gratifying. “Clearly,” he says, “I’m glad to see that the Roundtable has achieved the membership and recognition that it has, and of course I want to see it continue to grow. But it’s the conversations, and the new ideas, and the buzz around those ideas—to me, that’s what’s really great to see.”
 

Return to Exchange Home