by Chris Curran, with research by Michael Mariani

I am very passionate about coaching team sports and have been a basketball player most of my life. So, I read with great interest a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, What Can Managers Learn From College Basketball?

There are three very interesting points:

1.  That the majority of new jobs are sourced through “weak ties,” not close relationships. (I never heard this before, but it makes sense.  Interestingly, I heard the same thing at a presentation last week by Andy McAfee on Enterprise 2.0.  The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action?)

2.  Between 2001 and 2007 more than 280 coaching changes were made across 341 colleges in the study.  See any parallels here to the CIO tenure situation?

3.  Many of the coaches are part of one of eight “family trees” – The John Calipari Tree or The Rick Pitino Tree, for example.  Furthermore, being part of one of these trees improves your chances of landing good jobs.

This got me thinking:  Are there family trees for the Chief Information Officer profession?

To begin exploring this question, we started with the CIO 100 and supplemented it with LinkedIn and biographical data available on the web.  For anyone who has tried to develop an easily understandable network map of customers, contacts, etc. you will know that it is a difficult task to identify links and make any sense out of them.  That said, we think there are some indications that CIO trees do exist.

After spending a few days digging through the data, a few trees seemed to emerge.  One example was around John McKinley, the CIO at GE Capital, Merrill Lynch, President/CTO at AOL and now a partner with a digital business incubator, LaunchBox.  Here is an example of some of the IT leaders who were in John’s organizations and their current firm:

Since I don’t know anyone on this chart, it only represents leaders who were working in the IT organizations during John McKinley’s tenure and went on to CIO positions later in their careers.  Given all of the IT organization variants, it’s also unclear what kind of reporting relationships existed in each organization and how much influence or opportunity for mentoring there was.  But this data can at least fuel an interesting discussion.  The idea of a CIO leadership tree seems a even a little more plausible at GE, given Jack Welch’s history of developing future corporate leaders.

The other interesting question explored in Daniel Halgen’s original study, “All in the Family: Network Ties as Determinants of Reputation and Identity in NCAA Basketball”, is if members of strong coaching trees are more resilient in the job market.  His research found this to be true and that the jobs were more prestigious for those affiliated with the trees.

I wonder if by more prominently highlighting our leadership lineage, we can land more desirable jobs?  Food for thought.

Chris Curran & John Sviokla

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap.  Twitter shares all these attributes.  Twitter is a new layer of communication which can be overlaid on everything – just like Duct Tape can be used to repair a chair, or make an artificial flower.  Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets (messages of 140 characters or less) – for free.  It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you.  Some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help by others) over 28,000 tweets!  By way of comparison, the Boston Globe had a circulation in 2008 of about 350,000 – falling at a rate of 8-9% per year.  As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience.

But it is so much more as I’ve already discussed here; the range of applications is spectacular.  From online commentary for any off-line event, and the New York Times developed a great visualization of the tweets during the super bowl to Pepsi’s integration of Twitter with geographic information at the spectacularly popular South by Southwest music, film and interactive media festival to Whole Foods recipe tweets.  Almost every major media outlet is tweeting, the Apple App Store has over 100 Twitter applications, and there are over 100 free tools that have already bubbled up.

How did this seemingly trivial application that Jack Dorsey created in two weeks back in March 2006 as a way for him to know what his friends were doing grow into this global phenomenon?  We think it is because of three critical things: first, the design is simple, modular, scalable and cross platform.  Messaging used to be a youth dominated phenomenon, but just walk into any business meeting and think about how similar tweeting is to blackberry email.  As social animals, we humans are addicted to communication and understanding how our social group is acting and thinking.  In business this is very practical, and in social settings very entertaining.

Second, Twitter has an open technical architecture.  As I pointed out in another post, it is an example of an application that sits “in the cloud” and is available everywhere.  The interfaces to the capability are simple and well defined in their Applications Programming Interface (API), which makes it easy to plug into their messaging capability.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is very easy for people to join, and to self organize around topics, companies, individuals, and events.  In this sense it is an incredibly “democratic” medium – with all the control at the ends of the network.  Our Diamond Fellow David Reed wrote about Reed’s Law in Harvard Business Review many years ago about the power of self-forming networks and it is because of their very flexibility of organizing that makes them so powerful.

Twitter is, and can become so many things, we are suggesting three questions to think about – but they are only a start.

1. What are people saying about my brand?  There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, or issues your customers are thinking about, or complaints?
2. How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets – on their phone, web, or other device?  It is cheap, direct, and growing.  There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
3. What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product/service area, and target market?

We believe – as other pundits have pointed out – that this current wave of the internet is becoming more real time and populated by many mini-applications like Twitter that will be assembled together to create functionality.  Senior executives should care because marketing and sales has always been about communication, references, and word of mouth, and Twitter turbo charges that hugely human process.

Furthermore, we believe that the new “links” that Twitter creates with its Tweets, among and between people and groups will some day be mined for superior search and attention management – just the way Google uses page links to power its search algorithm today.  It is only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft buys them and integrates the functionality into their platform – and it will be part of how every company communicates and markets.  Now is a time to get a jump on the competition!