You think that was a great introduction,
but if you're where I stand
and you have to follow that introduction,
you gotta live up to it.
So, tough act to follow, but thank you so much.
I appreciate it, and thanks for having me here.
I actually asked Gurnad how these lectures kinda go,
and his observation was,
someone typically speaks for somewhere
between 45 and 60 minutes, and then questions.
Does that sound about like how things go?
So, I guess the question is,
or the invitation is that you can interrupt me.
That would be fine.
You'll find that when sort of when I walk
into second and third gear, I may talk quickly,
but that, I'll try to keep that at bay.
And also, that's not necessarily to exclude
or not prevent questions.
So, I wanna invite questions.
Let me ask you a quick, based on your introduction,
how many people, and how many people have read,
for example, Ron Bird's book in 92, structural holes,
or have seen it, are familiar with it?
Okay, so no, no, this is good.
No, see, because this really helps me.
This is actually, actually we'll be talking about this,
but I think there's a constellation of features
that make an entrepreneur,
and this is an entrepreneur, we'll say,
capital-y, an entrepreneur, whether it's
in collective action for purposes of profit,
skillful is to read the audience, right?
And so, how many people would consider themselves
social network scholars, of modest proportions, at least,
that they're familiar with that debate and conversation?
So, not many, and that would suggest already
I'm making sort of adjustments.
In fact, I probably have a deck that's directed
more towards going faster, and I wanna dial it back,
but that's fine.
Let me ask another question as long as I'm off the grid here,
which is, how many people have read
the Spirit of Capitalism by Boltanski and Chiapello?
So, just a handful, okay.
I think I got the lay of the land.
Let me ask you, so a lot of doctoral students here,
what are the doctoral students studying?
This is where you have to speak, you have no choice.
So, give me, just shout some names out,
like areas that you're studying.
Like you, we've made eye contact there, what?
No, not you, what's, yes, denim shirt, sort of, yes.
You're looking behind, no, yes, what are you studying?
Are you a doctoral student?
Urban planning, how many people are urban planning?
Okay, what other big categories do we have?
Urban planning, why didn't you raise your hand?
Okay, how about over the section, what are you studying?
Yes.
How many people are in economic geography?
Okay, any other major topics that have been excluded?
Urban design, okay.
I'm sorry?
Sociology, yeah, sociology, okay.
Okay, let's give me a feel.
I don't know if we're gonna get these guys to talk,
but we're gonna work it, so we'll see.
So, I, most recently, the biggest recent push
is to think about this stuff that Grinnote
was talking about in connection to projects.
And so, since you haven't seen some of this literature,
I think projects, as esoteric as this is gonna sound,
is in a very important unit of analysis
for how new stuff gets done.
And that's probably my fundamental preoccupation.
How, in fact, the title of the book for Stanford Press
is called Getting New Things Done,
which is an offhand reference that was made by Schumpeter,
who's an economist who did creative destruction.
And he just referenced this innovation
as getting new things done.
And I wanted something that didn't have such a high bar,
like disruptive innovation, because that's a complicated
term, and everything that became disruptive
didn't start as disruptive.
But it started probably as getting new things done
and became disruptive.
So, projects are really important,
and before even projects, I wanna suggest to you
that coordinating, work, how you all got here,
how I got here, is a function of coordination,
which I find to be infinitely fascinating.
And it's a puzzle that's not obvious,
it's almost mysterious, and if you can hang on
to the mysteriousness of how stuff happens,
even if you're doing urban planning,
I think it's a very important sensibility
to have as you study and go out and observe.
So, I'm not suggesting you start your paper saying,
I'm, you know, urban planning paper,
we're talking about the mystery of coordination,
that's not gonna make a lot of reviewers happy.
But it is, from my money, a very important area,
Weich will tell you and others before and after,
and the coordination's at the root of organizing.
He locates a lot of his, how many people have read anything
like Carl Weich, by the way, social psychologist?
Okay, a few, a well-known social psychologist.
This book that I just referred to,
that we now know most of you have never read,
it's called The New Spirit of Capitalism.
And Boltonsky is a very influential European,
I guess we'd call him a sociologist,
makes a set of observations.
He actually wrote a book before this,
called The Something of Justification.
What's it?
The Regimes of Justification.
And he suggests that capitalism has progressed
into like six genres.
Then he writes a new book with another co-author,
Chiapello, and said, you know what,
we got a seventh regime that we didn't talk about.
It's the most recent one.
It's sort of the way things go now.
It's called the Project Regime.
He calls it the Cité, and I don't know
if that's the translation.
You may know better than me.
But it's a new spirit of capitalism, this new phase,
involving a shift from industrial,
which was the preceding phase, phase six,
to project-based society featuring an organization
that is very flexible, organized by project,
works in a network.
And then back from that same piece,
life is conceived as a series of projects
that assemble a disparate group of people
for relatively short periods of time.
And I think what is being imposed on us
is the need to sort of recognize this role of projects
and how they have, what they have in our life.
Now some of the projects have been standard.
So doctoral students, you have a big project
or in your face, it's called your dissertation.
That is a project, but it's always been that way.
What is happening, so some projects have always been there
and your success has been hinged to your ability
to produce these influential projects.
But what the argument is here, and I think it's dead on,
is that there's a new, fluid way of acting
where your whole career could be defined
by your ability to get invited to the right projects,
to start projects, clusters and sequences of projects
to define your career and also up a level of abstraction
to find the success of your organizations, all right?
And so there has been a project oriented literature
and you'll notice that Gurneau is actually in this group.
He was actually on the wagon before,
I would assume, Vltonsky got there,
started a whole literature around project-based organizing,
Beth Betschke.
But now I'm gonna come back because you came here,
at least in part because you thought I was gonna be talking
about networks and brokerage and I wanna say
that if you think the projects are important
or if you're willing to humor me for the period of time
that you'll be here this afternoon,
that one of the independent variables that leads
and creates projects is the way that you broker
and coordinate action.
And I say here, a more rigorous understanding of brokerage
is a path to understanding the emergence
and pursuit of projects and coordination.
Coordination, projects, essential to organizing,
essential to your success, I would even argue.
And so that's sort of one way to motivate the talk today
is where do projects come from
and brokerage is hugely important.
It's also, I'm not gonna spend much time talking about this
but it's also somewhat invisible.
So you are here and I am here speaking to you
and you think, we all assume for the moment
that it's relatively automatic.
But there's all sorts of active coordination.
There was an outreach from Gurneau and Elke at some point,
that's just one sort of part of this coordinate of exercise.
There was communications to get you here.
There's a sequence of things that causes us to be here.
And all that brokerage stuff, which I think is,
as I've already told you, really, really interesting,
we disappear and we sort of think it's automatic
or we think it's very routine.
And what we wanna do is sort of peel back
all that routine that's sort of going automatic assumption
and realize that it's created, it's orchestrated.
And I wanna talk about that because if I said,
and that's all I have to say about coordination,
thank you very much, it's been a pleasure
to see you here in Hamburg.
You'd say, well, okay, that's great,
but what the heck is he talking about
in terms of coordination?
And that's where we're gonna go.
I'm gonna talk more about the nature of coordination,
particularly in the triad, because this is where I think
you get purchase on all the other coordinate of challenges
that you need to puzzle through.
I'm gonna talk more about coordination,
I'm gonna guess than you probably have heard
someone talk about for a while,
in particular around a brokerage.
So here we go.
And so this is, I'm gonna talk about brokerage
and a structural view, the Gurneaux,
am I pronouncing your name fairly okay?
Gurneaux, is that how you say it?
No, but it's okay.
How do you say it?
Gverneaux.
Oh, I'll never get there.
Gurneaux, it's, okay, Gurneaux, it's.
There's a branch for us in Gurneaux, Gurneaux.
Okay, okay, fair enough.
I'm gonna go to Gurneaux, if I just get the emphasis
on the first syllable.
So there is a structural view and it's important,
it has to be addressed without caricaturing
it as being overly simplistic.
But it does emphasize structure.
I'm gonna talk about that.
And then I'm gonna segue into
an alternative complementary view.
It's not the one, an alternative to replace it.
It's to suggest that if you can understand the structure,
social network structure, because it's really powerful,
important insights that we have about structure
in the literature now, and we can marry that
or combine it with an awareness of the process,
then we have a more complete view as social scientists
of what the heck is going on.
And I'm gonna even make it more concrete for you,
and I'm gonna suggest to you that Broke Ridge,
which is ultimately a triadic idea,
can I ask you what your name is?
Nadine, I can pronounce that one much better than.
That if I'm between Nadine and Elke,
and all of a sudden that this is the coordinate of unit,
right here, and there's only a couple things that can happen.
I'll get there, I'll leave you on the edge of your seats,
but there's only three things, variants,
of what can happen in Broke Ridge.
That sounds pretty provocative, doesn't it?
Aren't you kind of wondering what the heck that's gonna be?
Okay, I'm obviously very American.
Everyone's looking at me like I'm smoking something.
Okay, so I'm gonna give you that typology,
and then I wanna illustrate it without,
for the most part, any of my own empirical work,
but some interesting work that's out in the literature,
and talk about where does this take us at the end.
But, so I'll just say, before I hit there,
is say, for those of you who are network theorists,
which is only a handful, I consider myself a bit of a,
I wrote this paper that we're gonna summarizing
with Steve Breguite, he's one on social network theorists,
and Jason Davis, who is an org theorist from MIT.
We're acting as a bit of a provocateur,
and I saw a documentary,
did anyone see the documentary Catfish, it's in the US?
It's a story about, it's a documentary,
this guy is a painter, and he finds that there is a,
someone contacted him on the internet,
and says, I have a poor daughter who paints,
and we'd like for you to look at her paintings.
And over a, the documentary traces a path,
if you can ever get this documentary, it's amazing,
that they scam the artist in New York
to think that their daughter is a painter.
It turns out the daughter doesn't paint,
daughter doesn't really exist,
but there's a series of YouTube videos that they send him
that they pull off YouTube,
and they convince him over time,
and at one point, towards the middle of the movie,
they actually go to where she lives,
and find out that she doesn't exist.
And they find a whole different story,
which is, you think, oh, they're gonna be really angry,
but it turns out these are people in some amount of pain,
and why they were doing it is a whole movie.
But at the very end of the movie,
the husband of the woman who perpetrated the hoax
on the artist in New York makes this statement.
You think this guy's just a slug,
and he has nothing going on,
and he's sitting on the porch, and he makes this comment,
which gives the movie its title, and it's about catfish.
It's an expression now to be scammed on the web, catfish,
if you were catfish.
So here's the quote.
They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China.
They used to keep them in vats on the ship.
By the time the codfish reached China,
the flesh was mush and tasteless.
So this guy came up with this idea
that if you put these cods and these big vats,
put some catfish in with them.
And the catfish would keep the cod agile.
And there are those people who are catfish in life,
and they keep you on your toes.
They keep you guessing, they keep you thinking.
They keep you fresh.
And I thank God for the catfish,
because we would be dull and boring
if we didn't have someone nipping at our fin.
Now, very interesting, turns to you 180
when you're watching the movie,
because you've been disposed to be angry and judgmental.
And all of a sudden, you see the way
in which these scam artists,
because no one died at the end,
awakened the awareness and the compassion
of the guys who created the movie.
And in some ways, I'm saying that Steve Bergotti,
Jason Davis, and I are like catfish
to the social network community.
So there we go.
We're gonna be sort of this arch structural emphasis
that Guernot has mentioned to you in the introduction.
We wanna press.
It's not like we have the final word,
but it's an alternative view to kind of stir things up
and understand how important process is
and how we can avoid to neglect it.
Now, if you're like me at this point, you say,
okay, what's the talk about?
What's the main set of points?
And then here's what that slide is for
for those people who are like me.
So an issue is defining brokerage
in terms of a social network structure.
It's an open triad.
And now you'll see exactly what that means in a second.
The problem is this structural definition
leads us to ignore the critical role of brokerage processes
which restricts our theoretical and empirical progress.
The solution is to rethink brokerage
as a core set of structurally situated processes.
So the structure is still there,
but the processes are also included and not neglected.
And so I wanna extend that theoretical insight
by proposing three core strategic orientations,
which I haven't told you yet, right?
Remember I said to you,
this is why you're on the edge of your seats.
Is anyone on the edge of their seat at this point?
You're sort of in the green sweatshirt.
You're sort of on the edge of your seat actually.
You're just leaning forward.
Okay, I'm exaggerating.
But okay, extend this theoretical insight
by proposing three core strategic orientations,
tie these three to examples of other social network research
and suggest how new social network research
might leverage this insight.
Okay, so before now, so what I wanna do
is I wanna take you to the article.
This is going back to published in 2005.
So it's about seven to eight years ago
that Guernot mentioned.
And I wanna tell you where the insight came from me
because I had read structural holes by Ron Burt,
very influenced even now to this day,
but very influenced by Ron Burt.
And I had spent a year in the field observing people,
making innovations happen or not, as the case might be.
Not everyone in the automotive group
is making stuff happen,
but those that did were of particular interest.
I had seen a bunch of people.
And I was sure that what I had seen
was ratify everything I read about in structural holes.
I stood between Elke and Nadine.
And there was the structural hole,
this gap in the open triad,
which I'll say more about in a second.
And I'm watching someone like me
moving knowledge from Elke to Nadine
and making stuff happen.
And then I got my first round of data back,
which is more idiosyncratic in terms of small numbers.
And I saw some of the people that I thought
were iconic entrepreneurs.
Well, some of them had open, had gapping networks
and some of them had very closed networks.
Like, what was that about?
So at the point that I started,
and even after a year of field work,
I said, I saw this one guy, his name was Dan,
his name I gave him.
And he was one of my iconic
entrepreneurs, social network orchestrators.
He was the program manager for an entire platform,
which is a multi-billion dollar affair.
And he said, this is out of the ASQ paper.
How many people move networks proactively?
Tony Nelson, Jim Williams, Charlie Collins.
You're not so naive as to think
that everyone knows about this stuff.
Most people spend their entire lives
coming to understand functional responsibilities,
just the basics of their work.
They operate within that
and a couple of other relationships,
getting the job done faster.
That's what they're thinking about,
getting the job done faster.
Few recognizing that there's some ways to get things done.
Now, I spent hundreds of hours with this guy.
And when I got his network back,
and this is guy's master orchestrator,
he had a dense network.
One of the more dense networks
and sort of the core group of people I was focused on.
So what's that about?
Then I sort of did the,
after I had done the field work of about a year and a half,
I did the survey work and I found out I was wrong.
And I found out, so this is the finding
that the primary thing I was looking at,
that this church's young guy, young gain's idea,
and I haven't gotten there yet, sort of ahead of myself,
but this idea, the propensity for an actor
to connect people to each other in their network,
to close that open triad.
I had a, we have an action-oriented measure for that,
that that was predictive of their involvement
and innovation on the automotive platform.
But here's the piece that really pushed me to another level
that I only sort of referenced.
The insights from this paper are in the O5 paper,
but no one's sort of, it wasn't fully developed,
was that piece.
If you look across the entire platform,
you find out it's significant
that the connecting work leads to innovation
alongside the second fact,
which is they weren't open triads.
They weren't open networks.
They were closed networks
that were predictive of innovation.
And that got me thinking on a process
that sort of is culminating in the paper
that we're talking about today,
which is that structure and this connecting work
are two separate pieces.
They need to be disaggregated.
That's the academic way of saying pulled apart,
but disaggregated sounds so much more sophisticated.
Disaggregated and be treated separately.
So, the aha is if brokerage process can happen
in open or closed triads,
then it may not always be enough
to measure density or constraint,
which is the social network orientation,
when you need to think about something beyond that
as an alternative independent variable.
Now, just by way of background,
and this just turned out to be a useful slide,
I thought maybe it wasn't,
but just to conceptualize,
an open trade is nothing more
than what you're looking at now.
It's in other words,
the mediator or the broker is in the middle.
And if I lapse into this language,
the two people on either side,
these are three people,
these are referred to in the social network literature
and jargon is alters.
So ego, ego and alters is one way to think about it.
Ego is usually yourself,
but we'll call the broker the ego in the middle,
and two alters on either side.
If you want to situate that within a network,
Rachel obviously, this is a very simple networks,
apparently everyone Rachel knows does not know each other.
And so every pairing within her network
exhibits these structural holes.
So you might want to call this
more of an entrepreneurial network.
And then Noah, by contrast,
same number of people just for illustrative purposes.
All the people that Noah knows know each other.
And so this is a fundamental tension
within the social network literature.
This is the simplest rendering of it.
But there is long and fruitful and interesting debates
about what is more interesting,
not more interesting,
what is more productive and valuable
open versus closed networks.
Now the simple version of that is that open networks
are networks that are better for accessing novel information.
Because every one of those people that Rachel knows
who don't know each other
represents a different world of novel information.
More novelty coming to Rachel.
And then correspondingly Noah, his dense network,
everyone knows each other,
there's more of an echo chamber going on there.
So let me ask you, here comes a question.
What would be the advantage to Noah's network?
That's a question.
Can anyone think of one redeeming value for Noah's network?
Yes, sir.
Excellent answer, 100% right.
High levels of trust.
Does anyone want to double down on that
and take another stab?
Anything else?
Yes.
Absolutely, I would not have said,
the answer was so good,
I would have said no one could top that.
But this is as good as yours.
The ability, and that's exactly right.
And in fact, it's exactly the benefit.
It's there's an efficient, it was high trust.
I couldn't have improved on either of these two answers.
And they would be the first two I'd give.
And there's a high ability to collaborate.
And you can think about the collaboration
partially as a function of trust,
but also efficient exchange of effort.
If we all know each other,
and we're all talking the same jargon,
then you can imagine that we can,
getting people to kind of sing together, play together,
pursue a project together,
becomes much more straightforward.
And so, if you reverse it out,
I suggest that alternatively,
that Noah has an information problem
with Noah sourcing new information,
because he's got a little bit of the echo chamber going on.
And then Rachel has a mobilization problem,
which gets to your point, right?
So, even if you talk to some entrepreneurs
that are very skillful, skillful track record.
In fact, one is a famous sort of
focal point of a case I teach, a Harvard Business case.
And I brought him to my class one time,
and I asked him about his experience, master orchestrator.
And his, the common observation he made
that always sticks with me, he said,
it's exhausting work.
It's like, wait a minute, you're so busy
kind of tracing a heroic journey.
It's exhausting work.
And Garrett knows this, because in some ways,
my hunch is, I don't, we haven't spent a lot of time.
But I get a sense that you sit at the
boundary of many networks.
And so, constantly, and you may know this
if you have multiple identities,
or you're a urban planning student
who went to a social network course,
or a sociology person who took an urban planning,
any of these things.
And you watch the language differences,
and you watch, and you even find yourself,
and this would be a good thing, I would argue,
making translations, framing what you're saying
in such a way that it can be understood.
That's a good thing to know about,
because some people, per Dan's comments at the beginning,
go their whole life without being aware
about those changes and adjustments you make
when you work across boundaries.
But on the other hand, it's exhausting work.
And that's part of the agency of brokerage
that we're gonna talk about.
Now, this is the deeper dive into
academic definitional work,
but the work of, the idea of a broker has been out there.
It's a classic work, even if you're going back
to Zimmel, the famous sociologist.
But here is some of the classic definitions
that are out there, Marsden, sociologist at Harvard,
a famous definition, a mechanism by which
intermediary actors, that would be another name
for the broker, facilitate transactions
between other actors, lacking access to trust
in one another.
So there's a little bit of a wrinkle there,
which I'm not gonna get into, but the idea is lacking access.
That's the open hole.
They lack access.
I connect Elke, and I connect, I'm sorry,
I'm so bad with, Nadine, okay.
Nadine, you lack access to each other,
and that's the structural hole,
or that's the definition of a broker.
Similarly, Fernandez and Gould,
a more well-known sociologist, in another sentence
they say, does not permit the end points
of the brokerage relation, that's being Nadine and Elke,
to be directly connected.
And of course, the more well-known definition
more recently, people whose networks
bridge the structural holes between groups,
this is the social capital of brokerage,
and the word that Ron Burt very effectively coined
is to call that gap between Elke and Nadine,
I think I got it now, is a structural hole, okay.
Now, imagine that there's a whole literature,
I'm gonna go back a second,
because there's a whole literature
that has empirically found the power
of these structural holes and how they produce results.
For those of you who aren't familiar with Ron Burt's work,
he's shown it in some cases to be predictive of innovation,
predictive of getting promoted faster in a corporation.
If you have a lot of structural holes,
now there's wrinkles on that.
So for an example, he'll argue that it's more operative
at higher levels of the organization.
When you're a poor schlub at the beginning,
at the lower ends of the organization,
gapping networks are less useful,
but when you get higher up, they become more leverageable
if you have them, more accountable
for how successful you might be.
And because Ron Burt came up with a very parsimonious
measure for structural holes, a lot of people have followed
in his footsteps to use that measure of open triad-ness
to show it's an independent variable
that predicts a lot of things like innovation
and getting promoted.
And even at the intra-organizational level,
in intra-organizational networks,
the firms that have these gapping networks do better.
So lots of ratification of the open triad.
But imagine these two illustrations
to kind of show the exception as a thought experiment
about why it's not the complete story.
So think about a closed triad with brokerage.
So here's Professor Jack, who invites,
everyone knows each other, Jack, Sally, and Jane.
And Jack walks down the hall one day,
and he asks Sally and Jane,
said, we should work on a paper together.
Now, by the strict definition of the open triad,
we cannot call that brokerage because it's a closed network.
You with me on this?
Someone nod there, yeah, I got at least one.
Okay, someone on the right nod, yeah?
Okay, it just, it wouldn't count.
Brokerage is a very narrow term.
It's restricted to the open triad.
Now let's go the opposite and say,
let's give it an open triad and say,
brokerage structure without process.
Professor Sheila has ties to Rick and Joe,
who do not have ties to each other.
It's an open triad, nothing happens.
It's in what's called an inert structural hall.
By the legitimate definitional work of structural sociology,
we would call that a structural hall.
It's just not one that yielded anything.
But we feel comfortable calling that brokerage.
And my answer is, of course, happy call that brokerage.
But you can see the limitations that you can have
an open network which is full of opportunity,
but no one sort of harnesses or makes use of it.
So we take the definition,
and the classic definition of Mars,
and we're gonna rejigger it a little bit
to make it more Catholic,
to make it more open to alternative situations
like the ones I've just shown you.
And so the definition,
this is the definition, the first one on that list,
a mechanism by which intermediary actors
facilitate transactions between other actors.
We're changing mechanism to behavior
because we wanna be open to a more
broader range of activity in this view.
Instead of transactions,
we're gonna talk about interactions.
But these transactions sound like
a cross-sectional episode for money being exchanged,
in its most arch form.
And so we wanna open transactions to interactions.
And intermediary, it turns out,
we spend a lot of time talking about this.
Generally, people think of an intermediary
just as a situation between me being between
the dean and Alkay, that they don't know each other.
The definition of intermediary,
if that, in fact, some people carry around that definition,
we wanna pull away from that definition.
And so we simply say, in the revised version, third party.
And so our definition for including these process view
is behavior by which the third party
influences, manages, or facilitates.
So that's, we're adding to facilitate.
Influences, manages, or facilitates the interactions
between other actors.
And so now we've set the stage
for thinking about process richly.
There's the definitional work.
And now I wanna go there, talk to you about
the different ways that brokerage can take place.
And remember, this is the thing
that you were allegedly on the edge of your seat.
These are the three different kinds of brokerage.
So we're gonna suggest that brokerage takes place
in three different forms.
And I'll explain what these are in a second.
Tertius Gaudens, which you've mentioned, Giernaud,
and Tertius Young-Gains.
We wanna consider brokerage in terms of
different combinations of those three
being different forms of strategic orientation
and social network structure.
So let me suggest to you these three, what they mean.
The three types.
Conduit is coordinate action or information.
The conduit is I bring, Alkay is very interested
in path dependence.
Alkay doesn't talk a lot about it recently,
but she did some really interesting work and research.
And according to action or information between parties,
you have no immediate prospect
for direct introduction or connection.
And you live in what city?
Okay, so I go to Berlin.
We have lunch.
You tell me about your research.
And then I know that you have
some interest in path dependence.
And I say, I found out about your paper
and some other really interesting citations.
And I come to Nadine and I say,
I got some really cool citations.
This one and this one.
And you say, wow, you are so smart.
And I say, thank you very much, okay?
Now there's a lot of choices I make
at that moment of transactions.
I could say, well, actually, truthfully,
I met this brilliant scholar, Alkay,
and I've got it from her.
Or I could just say, thank you very much.
And in an extreme version, not extreme,
but I could ask for $5, right?
Then they change the story.
Maybe you're not a friend.
Maybe you're just someone who I transact with, right?
But all those things, this is conduit,
which is the movement of knowledge or resources
from one of the alters to the other.
The second is the one that Guernod mentioned,
which is in part something that Ron had emphasized in 92,
structural holes, Tertius Gaudens.
He took that expression from the famous sociologist Zimmel,
which as you mentioned means the third who enjoys.
But it also means more than that.
It means you're actively playing people off one another, okay?
And Ron mentioned it, I believe,
to make a very clear point about
why open triads are powerful.
But I think it's been overemphasized.
I think that he's pivoted away from that.
It's still part of the story,
but it's a much richer conceptualization.
But a lot of people have emphasized this idea
that the broker is playing people off one another,
and that's why, remember I said the open triads,
those people do better?
Why are they doing better?
Because they're keeping people apart,
they're extracting the value,
and they're keeping it from themselves.
And I'll explain more about what that involves.
Now, where I came along in that O5 piece
is to suggest something that everyone kind of already knew,
but to give it more formal operationalization,
is that there's this third who connects.
And so the options are not exhausted by saying,
I take information from Elke, bring it to Nadine,
or I play them off one another,
but actually I can introduce them.
Nadine, you would not believe.
I mean, we've known each other for months now,
and all I hear you talking about is path dependence,
and I met this leading path-dependent scholar,
she's just not working on it right now,
you guys ought to meet.
Now, there could be two different versions,
which I'll mention.
I could say, you ought to meet, and here's her name,
and that's called Brief Young Gates, I walk away.
Or I could say, let's get together,
I'm gonna introduce you, and we're gonna work together,
and I wanna facilitate, right?
And so there's different wrinkles, but those are the three.
Now, I told you that I thought there were three,
I think this is pretty exhaustive.
Now, I'm gonna tell you why there's wrinkles,
and ways to build out understanding each of those three,
but I think these are sort of pretty much the three.
And if you buy, which you don't have to today,
but I want you to think about it,
that the most important,
more coordinated phenomena that you experience,
or that organizations encounter, are triadic in nature.
So this doesn't mean there have to be three always.
But if I'm gonna connect all three of you together,
and then I'm gonna move you over to these two,
and bring you together, mixture of the two,
we can get back to not without much hard work
about why that's triadic in its nature, right?
So I think if triadic is important,
these are become really important
for understanding the nature of coordination.
If brokerage is important, and coordination is important.
Kinda like what they say in the US,
motherhood and apple pie.
It's hard to argue against,
at least coordination is being important.
But let me come back to one of the main points in the paper,
which is, let's not overly obsess on open triads.
And to kind of drive that point home,
I wanna give you this three by two,
which essentially says, listen,
there's your three brokerage types.
And it's not hard to understand in this example here,
the open triad where you don't know each other,
why it would work for these first two.
One is that I'm bringing information from L.K. to Nadine.
The second is Trisha Scowders,
I'm playing you off one another.
I haven't really given sort of an illustration of that,
but we'll come back to that.
But actually, let's just say,
I wanna write a paper on path dependence,
and I know you, and I know you,
and now I've brought you to the attention of each other.
No, no, you just say, I haven't introduced you,
this is an open triad, you haven't met each other,
but you know of each other's existence.
And so I say, you know what, Nadine,
I wanna be first author on this paper that we're writing.
And if that's an issue for you,
I know a really good other path dependent scholar, L.K.
And you're probably, you've moved so far
beyond path dependence,
you hope you don't mind me continually referencing you
that way, and so that's the plane off of one another, right?
And you can imagine all sorts of more sort of situations
where it could be a love triangle,
all sorts of places where Zimla has written about the gout,
it's a plane people off one another,
but there's a situation where I say, first author,
and let's imagine that I really don't deserve
to be first author, but I can get it published,
and you're a junior or something,
and I say, but I could go with her.
And then you say, okay, well listen, you know what, okay.
That's gout, and notice now that's in an open network,
but to the point of the paper,
that can also take place in a closed triad.
I gave you an example of, well, we know each other,
and you know, we all are fascinated by path dependence,
and I say, you would not believe what L.K.
told me the other day,
she just found an excellent story about path dependence,
no one's seen this, it's really cool, an article.
And so now I've just done that,
I've just done conduit within a closed triad.
It's not gonna have as much potential impact in some cases,
because if it's open, can you all see
there's a greater chance that novelty is gonna be exchanged
by being pulling from one to the other.
But it doesn't preclude it from happening
in the closed triad.
And similarly, in gout-ins, you could know each other.
Same story as before, you know Aylky,
and she's a really good scholar,
she's published a book on this topic,
but if you don't, I'm gonna go with that whole story.
And there's a situation in a closed triad
that we could have gout-ins as well.
Now, Tertius engaged in connecting work,
it's kinda easy to see, you guys haven't met each other,
you should get together.
And then similarly, in a closed triad,
I could say, you know each other, let's get together.
Because even though you know each other,
you didn't think about this paper till I brought it up,
and I'm bringing you together.
Now, for those of you, which is most of you
that are not geeked out on networks, that may sound okay.
So we just spent about 40 minutes, half an hour,
25 minutes talking about deep dives into brokerage
and triads that I didn't realize existed,
but my life is not any better or worse since then.
But this is actually, for us network people,
sorta interesting and in some ways provocative stuff.
Because it pushes on what we think about
the nature of coordination,
what we think about the nature of structural holes.
Now, I wanna go one more step
into these three different types of brokerage
to kinda give you a feeling
for what's involved in each of them.
So, I'm gonna talk about the conduit
with respect to nuts.
And it's actually probably time I use two different people
because these people aren't getting really sick.
May I ask you if you would be willing to,
what's your name?
Bettina, I can remember that one, and?
Martin.
What's it?
Martin.
Martin, can I just call you Martin,
simple, dumb American ways?
Okay, Martin and Bettina, okay.
And so, Bettina, what's your area of interest?
I would say social networks.
It is social networks, okay, yeah,
you were the one who actually said you had,
it's knowledge of it, okay.
And so, the issue is,
well, actually, I'll give you a different example.
This is how Schultz discovered, in some sense,
the main, he had already gotten involved with Starbucks.
But Starbucks did one thing that didn't do one thing
that you'd be surprised to know
when they got started in the day.
They didn't sell cups of coffee.
They sold ground coffee in bags.
You could taste, you could get a cup of coffee
to taste and test a ground bean.
He goes to Milan and he sits in the cafe culture
and he starts to look around and he's blown away
by the idea that there's a barista,
that there's something called a cafe latte.
I think that's the one he got from Italy.
And so, here he is, he's sitting in the cafe
and the first issue is to identify or discover the nut.
Now, the nut doesn't come, there's not like
angels singing from heaven when the nut shows up, right?
An entrepreneur sometimes has to carve the nut
out of raw mass of noise.
And because an entrepreneur largely
is visiting foreign territories,
whether it's Toledo or Milan, there's a lot of noise.
He's a visitor, he or she's a visitor in a strange country.
They've got to find and locate something.
Now, it's interesting, we start to think about the dynamics
when you set it up as a triad.
The broker is visiting Milan with the US in mind.
You sort of see that point there?
If a person's thinking entrepreneurially
and they have some frame.
Now, sometimes it can be like a WAP on the side of the head.
I'm not thinking about US, I'm just looking at that
and saying, oh my god.
And for the first time I think, no one has this in the US
who could take this back.
That's a different version.
But I'm saying he owns Starbucks or he's part of Starbucks
and he goes there and he sees it.
And now, with that in mind, he's already
thinking he's got coffee on the brain.
He sees, but he's still, we want to problematize
how hard it is to discover.
A cup of coffee, cafe latte, the idea of a barista.
Also, a little bit of the coffee culture
that you go to a coffee house and it's a place where
you hang out and that you feel like you're amongst friends,
even if you don't know anybody.
So identifying or discovering the nut
is a huge challenge in the conduit.
Framing or translating the opportunity to the nut presents.
So now I've got to go back and let's imagine,
I've got to go back and the first person or group
I have to show to is my co-owners.
What are you, crazy?
Baristas, you know, grand, they call the coffees.
Do the Starbucks use grande and vente, ridiculousness here?
Do you ever, guys, go ever to Starbucks?
They have like names for different sizes.
They don't do small, medium, and large.
Do they have vente here?
They have the same naming?
What do they call it?
Do you go to Starbucks at all?
What, you want to admit?
Well, I remember that they have pretentious names.
Are they pretentious names?
Small, medium, large?
Yeah, yeah, OK.
So there's this very sort of faux euro sophistication.
You have real euro sophistication.
We have faux.
But he has to pitch it to his board of directors,
and then he has to pitch it to customers.
So again, I want you to see that just finding the idea
is a big deal.
It's not bringing it back and figuring out
how you explain it to those who receive it is a big deal.
How is it that you move it?
How do you frame it?
All these are kind of challenging.
And then the last piece I sort of alluded to in terms of the fee
is you might charge for the nut.
That's another issue.
Now, there's different things you can do.
One is Nadine just is infinitely grateful to me
for turning her on, letting her know about OK.
And that might be, in effect, a rent, because it's offered me
some, it's improved my reputation.
It's improved my prestige, maybe to both of them
if I've made a good match here.
That is a form of a rent, but then there's
a question of actually going to charge.
I'm going to charge, and it could be in the form of money.
It could be that big conference you're throwing.
Maybe I don't even ask it.
But these are all ways that rent becomes
a factor in both conduit as well as interstices and gains.
It gets actually even more complicated there.
But the reason I want you to think about going to this depth
is I want you to understand the complications involved
with conduit.
And the challenges and the fascinating aspects of it.
Now, I'm on the plane reading the story in The New Yorker
by a well-known author who's a doctor who's writing really
good stuff on innovation.
And he is looking at why is it so hard to move innovation
around medical practices primarily.
And one of the things he started with historically
was anesthesia, which started off as a gas,
the snap was silent, moved very quickly.
And partially, there was reasons why.
Partially is that doctors were very resistant.
But within months, they came around.
And partially, it was because they had screaming patients
that's no longer screamed when they could become more
like the dignified doctors that they always thought
that they were by administering ether.
But the antiseptic stuff, where you kill off the bacteria,
had been discovered and diffused very slowly.
So all of a sudden, we start to see
that good ideas that are ratified as good ideas.
And I don't know that the cafe latte is a good idea
when I found it in Milan.
So it's not automatic that's good.
But even when it is good, diffusion can be very slow.
And why is that was sort of the subject of his article.
And the name is Gawande.
He wrote, just in part, in the area of iPhone, Facebook,
and Twitter, we've become a neighborhood of ideas
that spread as effortly as ether.
We want frictionless turnkey solutions
to major difficulties of the world, hunger, disease,
poverty.
We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops,
incentives to institutions.
People can feel messy.
People, human stuff, can feel messy and anachronistic.
And then a reference is back to the famous scholar
of Diffusion, Everett Rogers, who said,
diffusion is essentially a social process
through which people, talking to people, spread an innovation.
Now that's omitting a lot about what
didn't exist when Rogers was alive, which
is this thing called the internet.
Are we OK?
How are you?
Oh, are we in danger?
Did the battery come on?
So that could be an issue.
Do you have to hurry up?
Well, yeah, as if I wasn't talking fast enough.
So the plug is not plugged in.
We're not getting power.
Let's just go and show for a second
so we can see the battery again.
Yeah, it hasn't taken over.
So I mean, I could keep talking, but it'd
be like on the Titanic before we hit the iceberg.
Is there?
Maybe we had another laptop in the meantime.
Yeah, so.
Yeah, well, you'd need a thumb drive.
So god, I just assumed that the whole thing worked.
Let me just try this.
Because it worked in my hotel room.
OK.
Fifth slide.
So weird.
So it's delivered to create some youngins, actually.
Yes, yes.
We're creating some youngins activity here.
Oh, yeah, let's try another power strip.
But actually, it just worked, because this one
wouldn't work on those.
Oh, yeah, you can feel right there.
Let's just try.
Sound like it's a different side.
Is it?
And now it's.
So I can keep talking, but do we have?
Can we get another computer up?
And I have it on the thumb drive.
OK.
See where it was.
If I can go from memory.
That is the sound of a computer dying.
It's just such a sad story.
So where were we?
We were talking about the nut and the conduit.
And remember, I said how hard it is to move things.
But then I was going to move to the second of the three, which
was the church's gaudens.
And the gaudens, just to give you
kind of more of a feeling for what the gaudens can involve.
It's really interesting.
I haven't been here in a long time.
But it's not impossible.
The gaudens.
So one of the things in Zimmel, how many people
heard of Zimmel as the famous sociologist?
Is that a few?
So Zimmel writes a famous essay called The Triad.
And he talks about, in part, one of the ways
that the gaudens works is if the two alters are comparable.
Now, there's two versions of comparable.
So I think it says, if you just open it up,
I can tell you which one.
There's two ways I could talk about.
One is sort of an actual Elke and Nadine.
You know Nadine exists.
You've met her.
And now I play you off on another.
But there's another where there's an imaginary tension.
I say, and I keep picking on you.
But are you OK with this?
OK, I'm sorry, really.
Let me know later how much you didn't like it.
But I say, I know a lot of people know path dependents.
I know many scholars.
And if you don't, let me be first author.
I've never done this.
If anyone thinks I'm sort of involuntarily,
I'm not that kind of person.
So why did I think of it?
But anyway, you don't know him.
It's an imaginary person that I'm
playing against in this situation.
Oh, you got it.
You go back, back, back.
One more.
That's it.
OK, so that's number two and three.
That's parity one.
You're similar, but you actually know each other.
Parity two is hypothetical or alleged or phantom person.
The first is I simply got great ideas.
Now notice how similar this gets to the conduit, which
is I know great ideas.
But there were chances that you guys could have
run into each other.
There were times when you were, where were you from?
Where was your city?
There were times when we were in Berlin,
and I was right there, and I could have actually
introduced you to.
But I just benignly or self-interestedly
keep you apart.
And that's what number one is.
And the fourth is, and this has got a different name by Zimel.
It's called divide and conquer, divide and pare.
It's sometimes treated separate from gals,
but I think they're all to keep it parsimonious.
It's actually, I stoke the fight.
And I say to Jack, Frank says your work sucks.
He says here's why.
And you know a situation where someone in the middle
doesn't reconcile them, but in fact makes it worse.
Are we OK?
Yeah, that might be good.
Could it just fly?
Let's try.
Yeah, we're good.
We're good.
Thank you so much, Karen.
So the third is obviously the one
that I spend the most time in.
And I'm going to argue, and I've sort of come out of the closet
to say I do think in this project world in which we
now inhabit, I think this is in some sense
the master orientation.
My first thrust, and it's even the one sort of argued
in the papers, is just they're all important.
I do believe that.
It's almost impossible to imagine you doing Young Gaines
work without the other dude being part of the story.
So they're all operating simultaneously
in a skilled actor, a skilled social actor.
However, I think that the masterpiece, the master
behavior is the Young Gaines connecting work.
If you can't pull that off, in the world we live in now,
in many cases, you're really handicapped.
And so it's interesting.
So Simmel wrote about this, and he
talked about the nonpartisan who produces
the concard of two colliding parties.
So when there is a debate, and notice
how we played it when it was divide and conquer,
why he stoked the fire.
Here I'm resolving.
Whereby he withdraws after making
the effort of creating direct contact
between the unconnected or quarreling elements.
Or he functions as an arbiter who balances, as it were,
their contradictory claims.
I'm smoothing things over.
I'm trying to get these people to talk to one another.
And if anyone's been in that situation,
you know it sometimes involves talking to one and then
the other.
Sometimes it's just saying, let me put this out in the middle.
Now, the interesting thing, and I only discovered this recently
after I read Simmel's piece for the 40 or 50th time,
was that he really doesn't talk about the connected work.
There's a brief allusion to connecting the elements.
But that's in the context of a battle.
This idea that we take for granted
in modern culture of introducing people,
you should meet so-and-so, which is sort of the lifeblood
of the modern experience, and in particular of the entrepreneur.
Simmel doesn't really think about that.
Now, Simmel was clearly a genius.
So it's not like he didn't think about it.
It just doesn't come up in a triad in an explicit way.
And I mentioned to you this idea between the brief or sustain.
And then I also mentioned to you that it could take place
in closed triads or a triad where
I have a strong tie to you, a weak tie, all these hybrid cases
where there might be weak passing acquaintances that
connected to other people.
And then there's something called what I call one step
versus three step.
And one step is, and I'll show you
an illustration of that in a second, but one step is,
I got a great idea.
Let's write a paper.
We'll do it with Bettina and Martin.
I got a great idea.
Let's write a paper.
And it's at lunch.
I break it out to you guys at lunch, and everyone agrees.
So let's just say happy ending.
There's another version, which is you're the network person.
What kind of work do you do?
Urban design.
So I picture you say, this could be great contribution
to the social network community.
Are you in?
And you say, well, I have these considerations.
They say, this is a great idea for urban planning.
Networks hasn't been brought in urban planning.
Urban design.
I'm sorry, urban design.
It hasn't been brought in urban design.
It's a real opportunity.
And then I bring you guys to lunch
and say, very thoughtfully, some hybrid idea that
has enough that it has the appeal of Bettina,
enough that it appeals to Martin.
I call that a three-step.
And of course, three-step is just
a proxy for what could be an infinite set of variations
of back and forth of Bettina four times, back and forth
with you, back and forth of three of us, and then repeat.
So these are the kind of things that I actually
think when you start to look at real data
and how entrepreneurs are skillful,
these become really important to see as a backdrop
or as a supplement to understanding what the heck is
going on with the structure.
Not throwing the structure out.
Structure is important.
Spent a lot of my life looking at structure.
Now I want to bring the sophistication
with which we think of process to the level that
matches the sophistication with which we look at structure.
So that's that story.
Now, it's interesting.
In my model, it's not published in that paper.
I actually asked before I left the field,
because it was analyzing qualitative data.
I went back to those people before I left,
to what extent in a one-hour meeting
you use analogies, metaphors, and stories.
And this is another variable which
I'll talk more about Friday, which
I call knowledge articulation.
And knowledge articulation, your ability
to put ideas out in such a way that they're understood
by your audience, is highly correlated
with Tertius Young-Gains.
I don't mean like in the airy, furry world of theory
or qualitative for those of you who are quantitative.
I mean, I actually have a high quantitative correlation.
And I want to just show you an example of that.
So this is Tertius Young-Gains being highly,
this is just a correlation with innovation involvement.
This is a use of analogies and metaphors
highly correlated with, not surprisingly,
people who are out in the street pitching ideas
with some kind of impact.
But here, just a propensity to use analogies and metaphors
highly correlated with them being involved with innovations.
That's a striking correlation, if you think about it.
Because there's nothing inherent in one
that suggests the other.
But now, here's the interesting one
that I want to bring your attention to now,
which is the high correlation between these two.
And when you start to think about it, it's not surprising.
But how do I bring Martin and Bettina together?
I give them a story.
The story is the great paper that we will write together
and publish in ASQ, which, because of our distorted lives
we lead as academics, is something we care about.
In a real world, we'd say we can make a million dollars,
or a million is not even enough now.
It'd have to be 10 million, right?
But in our weird world, we're happy about getting
publications.
So I just want to do a quick wrinkle for the social network
people that there's a version of this that says,
you know what, there's a structural explanation of what
I've just described to you as process.
And the idea is, if you just look down here,
is that this is back to the example of Jack introducing
Sally and Jane.
And you could say, there really is brokerage coming around.
Because in the past, we were all friends.
This goes back to our example.
We were all, well, Bettina Martin, we were all friends.
And one version is I collaborated with Martin.
I collaborated with Bettina.
What I'm actually doing is there's a hole here.
A hole is not a friendship hole.
It's a collaboration hole.
You guys have never collaborated together.
And I'm actually playing the broker closing an open triad.
And it's an open triad in the collaboration content tie.
Are you guys with me on that at all?
OK.
This is a low-affet crowd.
I'm not sure, but we'll go ahead.
And that's what's happening there.
So the point I made earlier, I want
to suggest that there's a precise, rigorous, and measurable
way to think about these things, both qualitative
and quantitatively.
But conceptually, you can measure till the cows come home.
You want to have a clear architecture.
And I think that these three different ways of operating.
And I see brokerage as a core variable.
Sometimes they're exclusive of each other,
but sometimes sequential.
But I think most of the time, so I'm
altering this before your eyes.
I think most of the time, they're simultaneous.
And I see Young Gains as the master orientation.
I'll give you an example, which I'll
mention on Friday again, which is the idea of I'm
going to throw a dinner party.
And if I throw a dinner party, and absolutely Elke,
and Nadine, and Martin, and Bettina,
because I gave you such a hard time, you're invited.
And Guernot invited me.
You're invited.
But now what do I do about some of the people in the back row?
Every time you do a dinner party,
your assignment is to gather a group of 10 people
that you think would get along together.
And maybe there's someone you want,
you have some instrumental reasons for getting them there.
But there's also people you don't invite.
They may even be good friends of yours,
because you don't think they'd be a fit.
Or there's only so many seats at the dinner table.
So in that very act, it's a core act of Young Gains connecting.
Dinner party at my house.
There's Gaudens there.
There's people that I did not invite,
and you could call it strategic.
But it's a sort of a fact of nature that you can't invite.
In fact, the most skillful actors, and I see this,
is that there's some people that have the pedal to the metal
all the time.
Does anyone know of someone like that?
They're connecting people almost compulsively all the time?
Does anyone know someone like that?
I'm not going to ask you about it.
Well, I know people like that.
And the thing is, it's not optimal skillfulness.
Because they're constantly, well,
they're periodically connecting people
that don't belong together.
And if that goes poorly, it goes poorly
for the people involved.
It goes poorly for their efficacy
within the network going forward for the reputational effects.
So it can't be 24-7 connecting people all the time.
It's some combination of these three approaches,
and you're kind of using them all the time.
Now, this is sort of the last phase of the presentation.
I'll take about five more minutes.
I'm going to give you a couple illustrations from research
to show how these things all work.
And so recall this idea that analogies and metaphors
shape things.
And I talked to you about a three-step.
So let's look at this example.
I realize I'm neglecting the German chancellor.
And it didn't occur to me till I was looking at it last night.
Maybe this.
But at any rate, here's the story from The New York Times.
What's that?
Oh, I thought something.
OK.
According to accounts provided by White House officials
and corroborated by European and other officials also
in the room, Mr. Obama escorted both men.
This is the Chinese and French prime ministers, whatever.
Both men wanted a time to a corner of the room
to judge the dispute.
How about replacing the word recognized, Mr. Obama,
suggested with the word note?
It was not a Middle East peace accord,
but Mr. Obama had his first moment as a statesman.
So let's just go, let's geek out on this a little bit
and say there he goes to Sarkozy.
He forms and establishes the tie.
Then he goes to Hu in China.
And then having sort of understood,
he brings them together and creates the tie.
And that's what I call sort of young gains.
When we get to pass just the idea
that you're connecting people and say,
how does it actually happen?
How do you connect people?
We're starting to talk about that.
One is that there's probably an incentive, not always
the case, but often something that's
put in the middle in the form of an analogy metaphor story.
It could be one step right at the top.
It could be this three step that we're talking about.
Now I want to talk to you about a great piece by Longlingo
Mahoney that is about Nashville music.
And they used Tersha's Gout and Tersha's Young Gains
in understanding what the heck happened.
Have you seen the story is this paper?
You've seen, you've seen everything I'll get,
but you've seen, yeah.
So here's the story.
I got the showcase.
So this is one of the producers does this.
I got the showcase moved to a larger club.
I got the head of the century record label
and the head of A&R and other big label
and other label fantasy records to the showcase.
That's Tersha's Young Gains, right?
Everyone see that?
Okay, getting people to come to the event.
And they, the band, were smart enough
to bring a truckload of fans to plant in the crowd.
So that's the second Tersha's Young Gains.
That's what I'm gonna call a rotating broker
because the first broker was the producer.
Second broker was the band.
They were the second note in the triad
and now they're doing connecting work.
So when the band hit the stage, the place went unglued.
And the century record label people are going,
what the hell is this?
Then he looked back at fantasy label who was also present.
And they're in the midst of what was a Young Gains event
with two different brokers actively orchestrating
is Gaudin's activity.
He didn't get fantasy and century and A&R together
so they could do a group hug and sing kumbaya.
He got them so they could see each other across the room
and start to worry about each other
and hopefully push the deal forward.
And the second, continue on is,
so then I, that's the producer talking,
went back and talked with the fantasy a bit.
I could see they were digging it.
They said, who else knows about this?
Well, I said century is here.
So he's stoking the fires.
If you didn't know that I had century here, they're there.
They're sitting in the corner.
And he says, I want to sign them tonight.
That's not an accident.
That's not like, oh, this is qualitative data
and we're gonna do some interpretation.
No, this is exactly what's happening.
You could map this sociometrically to show what happened,
who were the people he joined,
and then how he leveraged that qualitatively
to make the deal happen.
So that's another illustration.
Now, let me give you another example.
Has anyone read this stuff by Sid here, Venkatesh,
on gang leader for a day?
Has anyone seen this?
He's a sociologist at Columbia.
Brilliant sociologist.
Lived in the projects of Chicago.
I should always.
He did.
Now, if some of you are in urban planning,
some of you are in a business environment,
just think about any context that you might think
about how all these different behaviors are playing out.
And so there's two rich examples
from Venkatesh that I'm gonna use here.
So unfortunately, one kid shoots another kid.
That's the start.
That's not uncommon.
Johnny's parents, what I'm gonna call JP,
don't know William's parents, which is kind of interesting.
This kid shoots this kid.
They may not know each other.
We don't know, but they had probably some kind of fight.
Parents don't know each other.
So now you have sort of a structural hole of sorts.
JP contacts the school teacher.
And why does he want the school teacher?
He wants the school teacher to see
if the school teacher can patch things up.
The school teacher passes it on to the pastor,
not passes on and stepping away, passes on the pastor.
And now, in other words, school teacher is, in effect,
hiring a pastor to provide that tertious young gains role.
So let's take another step.
So you can see here that there is the school teacher
who's connecting these people.
Presumably, I'm gonna guess he or she took some action
to connect these people who were at war with each other.
Maybe he talked to intermediaries first,
which could be condo with the turns to TI.
But then he turns to a second broker
to be more effective potentially
in pulling these two together.
And so now you can start to see
some really interesting change.
And you start to model this.
You can see some really interesting behavior
where it's not just the simple version
we're talking about by one person connects two people.
They go home and they sing a song and it's happy.
It's one person who goes in war.
They bring in, they ask someone else,
who asks someone else to broker,
who goes to someone else who's more skillful
in a position to broker.
Here's another situation.
Oh, by the way, one thing that never happens in the scene.
So those are both TI things.
Then no one calls the police.
In this situation, the police are kept out of the scene.
So there's some guidance.
In the middle of, there's a sign with 1080
I was talking to you about.
In the middle of Young Gaines connecting,
there is this disconnect, police are not brought into it.
Now, things change, the police work
to become more credible in that community.
And here's the second version, this is the last one.
Jeremiah Shatino, family's called the police.
So the family didn't,
the parents did not talk to each other in this case.
And they called the police, that's an interesting piece.
And then they called the clergy.
Clergy calls, now here's an interesting piece.
They call four gun brokers in the neighborhood
and tell them not to sell guns for 30 days.
And calls the other person who knows other gun brokers.
So effectively what's happening is,
the police are brought in to do some connecting work
between them, but more importantly,
the clergy is going and hitting on the brokers
and saying, don't sell guns.
Which is gout and stuff, right?
That's saying, I want to prevent you from connecting
instead of connecting.
The takeaway I want you to have at this point is,
because it's nice if it's simple.
Four things in life are not simple.
And that would be field configuring events, for example.
But if you can get down your analytical terms
to a spare number, and you feel confident
that they're reasonably good, then armed with that,
you can sort of go off into the world,
start to look for behavior with more precision.
Now I'm gonna argue that I think these three
brokerage behaviors are pretty exhaustive.
But you saw from my wrinkles, that they're not,
I mean there's different variations.
It's not like it's very simple to kind of pull the trigger
about when you see it or not.
There's different variations.
But it helps us recover this active role
that brokers have in making stuff happen.
And it suggests different sequences
where there could be young gains, then gaudens,
or different combinations simultaneously
that are crucial for making them happen.
Now, if measurement, how many people work,
let me say, have more of a quantitative bent here?
There's just, okay.
So Travis Grosser, who is a student of Borgati,
who's now at University of Kentucky, just moved,
is a doctoral student who collected some data with me
in a couple high-tech environments in West Coast.
You recognize the first piece,
the brief young gains, sustained young gains.
But now he's created an additional set of measures
which he calls media ocean brokerage,
be going between two altars without connecting them,
and actual separation brokerage.
And so if your orientation is towards the quantitative,
my argue, my position would be go after structure,
we're not throwing structure out,
social network structure.
Hopefully longitudinally, that would be nice.
And then hopefully qualitatively to supplement.
But that's, the order is getting taller
in terms of the effort and energy involved
for data collection and analysis.
But then also back to the quantitative piece
to measure from a standpoint of capturing,
in addition to brokerage structure,
the connecting work versus the separation work
that people are doing, then you get a complete look at
how people are coordinating or not as the case may be.
Now, if I'm 24-7 separation, and we know people like this,
I mean, they get good ideas and they hoard them
and they don't connect people, that's possible too.
And that can be a factor in your puzzle as well.
You could probably go across a whole organization
and find probabilistically,
are there any young gains people?
Or how many young gains people are
and how that connects to innovation.
So that's the piece that he developed.
So conclusions and then some final comments.
Brokerage is a process along with,
as a process along with brokerage as a structure,
I'm suggesting that they both gonna go hand in hand.
And secondly, if you get that,
allows us to understand more complex brokerage behavior
increasingly characteristic of modern organizations
and markets, but also think about that scene
or scenes with Venkatesh.
So we're not restricting ourselves
to sort of blatantly economic and businessy kind of things.
This is real social phenomena that we can unpack.
And I haven't reached out to Venkatesh about this yet,
but I'm looking forward to because I think
he does allude to a lot of what's happening
in Chicago as being the phenomena,
highly cited stuff on brokerage.
But the precision and the way that we're going after it
isn't there yet.
And I think that there's a real opportunity for that.
And this is more hypothetical
and I haven't written about it yet,
but I'm guessing and banking
that in the environments becoming more project based
and innovation focused, young gains as that master behavior
has become more and more important.
The people who exhibit that and know how to orchestrate it
are gonna become more powerful.
Now, areas of further research,
certainly innovation within the firm
is where I begun, Interfirm Collaboration.
Micro foundations of strategy, how strategy gets started.
Those of you who were in the B school environment,
it's a very hot topic right now.
I think on gains and brokerage is a big story here.
Entrepreneurship, founding processes
is a very influential book by Rook who's at Princeton.
It talks about, in effect, he doesn't use this language,
but the micro foundations of entrepreneurship
and he refers to innovation
as a collective action experience.
But he doesn't build out that process piece
that makes entrepreneurship go.
And I think it's a huge opportunity with an entrepreneur,
but I have a paper on that right now.
And social skill and institutional theory
and collective action.
That gets back to Flixton McAdams and their piece
that's talking about social skill and institutional theory.
Anyone who works here
with a little bit of institutional theory?
Is anyone?
That's a very good, I don't know if you've seen it,
it's a very good book to read.
It's probably one of the most important books
that have been recently written.
And they come back to micro social issues
and they talk a lot about social skill.
Maybe you've seen it.
So, bottom line, final slide.
Confine complicated social processes
by theorizing, observing,
and measuring social network structures and processes.
Look at brokerage in particular
as it relates to innovation and projects.
I mentioned this about the method.
Consider multi or longitudinal methods
and potentially juggling quantitative,
qualitative and historical.
People say some interesting things historical.
McAdams and Flixton talk about
the emergence of the MBA, MBS industry,
and the deep south and the resistance to the,
Martin Luther King
and the whole historical piece behind that.
But they don't have the precision of looking in.
But if you look in really closely,
you don't get the precision of the historical view.
Where there's ways to blend those,
and that's partially what I'm gonna try to do with the book,
I think it's important to borrow from both
so you can sort of see both sides.
The general architecture of how things unfold
with the granularity of how they might have
happened in the streets.
And pick interesting places to study.
So, that is my digitally interrupted,
electrically interrupted presentation.