Slow-twitch muscle
Network orchestration
Partnerships that compound over time.
Innovation seldom happens in isolation. Enduring companies act as catalysts, convening liquid networks where hunches from different disciplines collide. The network is slow to build and hard to copy, which is exactly why it is an advantage, and why a startup should start building it before it feels necessary.
How you train it.
Create standing rituals where people from different functions work on something together that no org chart assigned.
On your own: Keep a small circle of people who see the world differently from you, and meet them on a schedule.
Who does it well.
Gmail, Maps and AdSense came from cross-team side projects; the dense internal network was the real product.
Evolved from hardware maker to orchestrator of integrators, technology partners and customers across 60 countries.
Drills.
Networks to learn with
Put yourself regularly in rooms where people from different disciplines trade half-formed ideas: a salon, a reading group, a standing lunch. Hunches collide there in a way they never do in meetings.
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From
Give people who share a craft but not a manager a regular place to meet. Ideas move along these lines faster than along reporting lines.
Etienne Wenger
A small, fixed group of peers from other companies who meet monthly under confidentiality and speak only from experience, never advice. The format has been refined over decades.
The forum format of YPO and Vistage
Pair senior people with junior ones who teach them, on a schedule. The senior person learns what the organization is quietly already doing.
Jack Welch at GE, 1999; widely adopted since
Networks to build with
Draw who creates value with whom, what flows between them and where the gaps are. Most companies discover partners they already have and never orchestrated.
Value network analysis, Verna Allee
A set of canvases for designing a platform that lets others create value on top of what you provide, rather than selling them a product.
Simone Cicero, published under Creative Commons
Deliberately move ideas across the company boundary in both directions: license in, spin out, co-develop. The discipline is deciding what to keep closed.
Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation