Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge shifted gears away from technology by talking about the personal side of networks and organizations: their company focuses on organization change, particularly that required to make organizations more transparent. Although it’s not identical to the presentation that they’ve delivered here today, there is a presentation linked from their home page, Collaborating in the Networked Organization, that has a a bit of the same content and is interesting on its own.
Networks can be public or private, and can be for purely social or business purposes. From an organization standpoint, networking within teams requires new principles, behaviours and tools, establishing the four common principles of purpose, nodes, time and links. Adherence to these priniciples provides consistency when working in online spaces, essential if online networking is going to work in a corporate environment.
They finished up with a poem written for them by Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, called Decide to Network.
As an aside, Lipnack and Stamps work completely collaboratively on stage, effortless passing the conversational ball back and forth.