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* Networks provide the underlying structure to a massive part of life and the universe * That network structure applies on many levels, including our brains, the internet (and the collective intelligence it is catalyzing), applications, organizations, and business ecosystems * We can usefully think of these networks as sometimes literally coming to life * The key factors that enable networks at the societal and organizational levels to come to life are Connectivity, Standards, Integration, and Structure * Organizations need to be balanced between structure and chaos to create the conditions for agility, responsiveness, and success * Business ecosystems are central to value creation today, yet require rich flows of information that are predicated on trust and effective strategies for spanning organizational boundaries * Applications are themselves networks, coming to life through modularity, distributed architecture and development, and integration with human processes, thus supporting the living networks of organizations and business ecosystems

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns. After IDEO's two-year internal development effort to create and implement "the Tube," their enterprise-wide intranet system, we gained new understanding and experience in balancing technology possibilities with behavior realities. The unique success of the Tube comes from the insight that effective knowledge sharing is a social activity that is enabled by technology, rather than a technological solution bolted onto an existing work culture. Now IDEO's Knowledge Sharing Team shares a set of design principles for building online collaboration systems that really work.

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, by Jon R. Katzenbach, a senior partner at Booz & Company, which publishes strategy+business, and Zia Khan, vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation. They take a much more fine-grained approach to managing that is based on finding the right combination of the "logic of the formal" and the "magic of the informal."

In the three-part book, the authors focus on how individual managers can use informal connections and conversations to enhance the formal incentives and structures of a company - and, in the process, motivate individual performance and mobilize organizational change. Managers who can draw on both the formal and the informal as required have a high "organizational quotient" (OQ). This is a combination of intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) that balances disciplined and spontaneous actions, and rational and emotional thinking, depending on the demands of the situation.

The objective is consilience, which literally means a jumping together of the formal and the informal, a creative integration of "both...and" that harks back to Mary Parker Follett, the early-20th-century pioneer of organizational theory. This is the first of several evocative metaphors that the authors use to describe one of the most desirable but elusive phenomena in organizational life - those times when decisions, actions, and emotions jibe with strategic intent, when dynamic routines are constantly being improved upon, when employees are proud of their company, and when the company as well as the members of its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, and customers) all succeed.

Katzenbach and Khan stress that a managerial focus on the informal is not just a matter of being nice. People work and perform much better when they are treated with care and respect as individuals. The c

Effective listening. Pattern recognition. TED video.

Wisdom is relational, if at times only with ourselves.  It is shared, between body and mind, person to person, human and nature.   It is an arc of spirit that extends from one subject to another, being to being.  Bending across geography and time, but more often eye-to-eye, or gut-to-heart, wisdom occurs.   It's an occurrence, one that we hope will last days or years, but sometimes it flashes like lightning.  As a happening, I cannot carry it with me.  We access it, experience it, witness it.   If wisdom exists in the spaces around and within us, why is the world not evolving as we desire?   I often turn the other way.  I don't want to see it.  In order for the arc to connect me to a book, a person, or the earth itself, I must commit to seeing things as they are, to being engaged and curious, and open to the transmission - willing to see the beauty and the pain, the divinity and the humanity, whatever is present.