"When people pay $50,000 for a market survey and find the numbers are 50% off," adds Panzer, "they stop believing the bullshit and start listening to each other. Out of that you get fusions of technologies, strategic alliances, all sorts of good things. Given the challenges out there [in the marketplace], we know we can't sit back and wait for this kind of network to create itself. We have to make it happen."
So what happens when this kind of new-boy network really happens: when the learning curve for any one individual is dwarfed by the accelerated education of the group as a whole? According to Anne Dosher, an organizational psychologist who has advised the SoCalTEN group during its developmental stages, finite problem solving like Eric Lesin's then becomes almost a secondary consideration. While most CEOs join these groups out of pure self-interest, she says, the network's greatest potential value is much larger than the sum of its working parts.
"Any network must be looked at from two perspectives," says Dosher. "How individuals learn within it, and how the entire group functions as an agent of change. Right now, SoCalTEN is very focused on internal learning and resource sharing. The challenge for them -- and of greatest interest to me -- is how consciously they evolve into the kind of metafirm where learning happens across company lines. Many networks fail at this point. They get too rigid, too cliquish, either collapsing in on themselves or becoming just another old-boy network. To avoid this, it takes a lot of outside direction and some inside recognition of the genius of the network itself."
Panzer and his colleagues have already made one move toward developing the "metafirm" concept by establishing the Research Institute for the Management of Technology (RIMTech), a CEO-based, entrepreneurially driven research institute centered around, in Panzer's words, "the knowledge explosion that academia hasn't responded to -- because they haven't studied it." RIMTech's current primary goal: increasing domestic exports to other Pacific companies by facilitating exchanges on a CEO-to-CEO basis. To begin that process, says SoCalTEN director Robert P. Kelley Jr., RIMTech will first have to canvass members on basic issues affecting international trade: import duties, the costs of setting up export divisions, the risks of contracting overseas labor, and so on. Once that knowledge is collected and synthesized, believes Kelley "the interest [in collaboration] we've already seen in Japan will really mushroom." And the RIMTech network, one presumes, will be the vehicle by which interest gets translated into commerce.
In fact, networks are the elementary media for all sorts of such translations. Much of Anne Dosher's work has focused on human-service organizations; now she sees "a generic-model crossover" between those groups and for-profit enterprises like family-owned businesses and go-go high-tech firms.Family businesses, she notes, traditionally have trouble integrating non-family members into management positions; similarly, technology firms often suffer from having engineer-CEOs who are better at building machinery than they are at building management teams. By teaching one another to listen and think, these managers "break the frame" of their own narrow reference points. The more frames that are broken, the faster the process moves along.
Similarly, the more the network expands into the "metafirm" model, the more it becomes, in the words of SoCalTEN co-founder Jeffrey Weiss, "like the phone system. It's the difference between having a machine in your office that can send and receive information with a few [other users], and being able to plug into a worldwide network that accesses almost everybody." Having this kind of access, Weiss adds, creates a context for exploring ventures that might seem much riskier if they were undertaken in relative isolation; and that context, in turn, gives member companies a distinct competitive advantage in a world marketplace. RIMTech, with its central clearinghouse of information, could be the next significant step in that process.
"What we've learned from the human-services side is directly transferrable to today's corporate culture," Dosher avers. High-tech CEOs, she says, tend to learn "cognitively" -- analyzing ideas and then implementing them with all due speed. Running companies, on the other hand, often requires more of what she calls "reflective learning" -- chewing over the implications of each step before it is taken; the kind of learning that integrates softer, more "feeling" aspects of human experience. This in turn, Dosher says, "argues for either a different kind of CEO altogether, or one who learns how to adapt to a changing environment. For now, the roundtables certainly help them do that."
"Cognitive and reflective learning?" "Breaking the frame?" The concepts may seem a bit esoteric -- not to say eggheaded -- to an overworked CEO sitting in the middle of the organizational ball, looking out at all his anxious constituents. But whatever his appetite for metafirms (or metaphysics), Eric Lesin would agree on one point, anyway. For a loner, he found himself in pretty useful company when the chips were down.
"Believe me, I'm no joiner," he says firmly, "but I schedule all my travel around those meetings now."
Spoken like a man who, having mastered geometry, sees geography from a whole new angle.
