My professional friend Rob
Cross is a professor of management at
the University of Virginia and, I think it’s safe to say, the leader
in applying "social network analysis" (SNA) to business and professional
organizations.   SNA is nothing mysterious; in fact it
reflects one of the bedrock truisms of human nature, that people
who trust one another work better together and share more information,
resources, and contacts.

Rob is now director of The
Network Roundtable at U.Va., a consortium of firms dedicated to
teaching managers how to conduct and apply SNA to their own organizations
and how to use it to promote, among other things:

• innovation
• large scale change
• post-merger integration
• closer connectivity with clients
• alignment of execution with strategy, and
• leadership development.

The membership
ranks are blue-chip, including:  Accenture,
Bain, BCG, British Petroleum, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Hewlett
Packard, Hill & Knowlton, IBM, Intel, Lehman, Mercer, McKinsey, Merck,
Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, PWC, and the World Bank. 

At the
moment, no law firms belong—but Rob assures me he would be
most interested in being able to include a few who would be interested
in exploring the benefits of applying SNA internally.   Legal
Week just issued a
piece on the uses of SNA within law firms,
so it’s rising above the radar horizon.  That piece focuses
on how SNA can contribute to and undergird efforts at Knowledge
Management, primarily through the inter-related mechanisms of trust
and reciprocity:

"People know who the knowledge sources in their organisation
are and will gravitate towards them, not based on the sources’ formal
organisational role but on the power and effectiveness of their knowledge.

"Sometimes people will provide information out of a sense of
altruism, but there is a sophisticated market of barter for providing
information within organisations which has the benefit of providing
not only the theoretical but contextual tacit knowledge. There is
an unwritten rule that the party receiving information will at some
stage reciprocate."

Any readers who might want to learn more about
what SNA might be able to do for their firm should start with this
primer on what SNA can achieve within organizations, and
if you and your firm would like to pursue it, please let
me know and we can explore
further from there. 

But just to whet your interest, here are two SNA maps of the same
firm.   The context of this analysis was that, 18 months
before these maps were drawn, the firm had inaugurated a sustained
effort to get people to collaborate across practice
areas and hierarchical levels on client projects.   Looking
at the left map, you’d say they’d succeeded; but looking at the
right, you’d say they failed.

In other words, if
your reaction is "separated at birth," you’re not far
off; how could this possibly be the same firm? 

The answer:  The left map includes the top nine executives;
the right map omits them.  In other words, the leaders had
"gotten their own memo;" the troops had not.  Something
worth knowing?  I’d say so.