Rehashing important ideas on innovation and social networks

There’s a couple of reads I’ve come across today that I can’t help commenting.

Aaron Shapiro at Fast Company blatantly rehashes the takeaways from the classic «The innovator’s Dilemma» here. AND he doesn’t credit the source, which is so very bad manners. OK, so reading the actual book may be harder than pottering about the web… and only one of the commenters seems to have noticed the plagiarism or «rehash». I suppose the kind way of looking at it is that those concepts have entered the mainstream.

On the other hand, a fellow at the Community of Practice group of LinkedIn shared a 2007 link to a Fortune article that describes the «shadow organization», the workings of the informal, effective network below the corporate theory of titles and responsibilities. It delves in examples from the work of Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan with a handful of good instances of social network mapping, and it also shows how it can be managed (with limitations) to improve the company’s results. Everybody knows who is who in the immediate vicinity, but the larger organization is another matter… and it does matter indeed.

Social network mapping is one of the «classic» techniques associated with knowledge management, but it has fallen out of the limelight for reasons unknown. A pity. If you have the time, have a look at the article and see why: it’ll be worth your time.