For the last decade I have examined and applied social network analysis in and across organizations, for example in large professional firms, technology purchase decision-making, high-performance personal networks, and other applications.
The more time you spend with the analysis of social networks in organizations and those firms that have applied the techniques, the more evident the power of these approaches. In particular for high-performing organizations, applying social network analysis is one of the most useful tools in pushing value creation to the next level. This is evident in the California Management Review paper I co-authored on Managing Collaboration: Improving Team Effectiveness through a Network Perspective, in which we examined how to improve performance in sales, innovation, and execution.
Innovation is of course a particularly pointed issue today, with the increasing pace of external and industry change driving the necessity of effective, applied creativity. However this is often difficult in large, complex organizations.
To this point, the IBM Institute for Business Value has released a report on Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity.
The report has some interesting insights and findings, including this chart of the opposites needing resolution in a creative organization.
![Opposites_creativity](https://rossdawson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Opposites_creativity.jpg)
Source: IBM Creative Leadership Report
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