The Social Organization

Books on my social networking To Read list

There are so many great books out there and not enough time to read them all.  People recommend books to me quite often and others I find through my own searches. I have 4 or 5 stacked up at home but also have the following books on my To Read list in no particular order:

Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management

Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications

Social Networks and the Semantic Web

Network Flows: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life -- From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities

Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness

Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty

Sensemaking in Organizations

Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information

Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration

What is on your social media reading list?  Any recommendations or suggestions from this or other lists? 
  

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

I've been reading a great book recently - recommended to my by Sue Feldman with whom I work closely.  It is an absolutely fascinating book ostensibly about the founding of the Santa Fe Institute. Really however, it explains how a number of experts in fields ranging from economics to medicine to psychology to physics all came together to learn more about their own discipline by understanding the leading thinking in other disciplines.

If the book was only a history of the founding of the institute it would probably be interesting but Mitchell Waldrop has a great gift for explaining this relatively complex subjects in regular English and in doing so introduces the concepts that started the field of complexity research.

Particular things I've found quite interesting:

• Large sets of things (the first example was biological elements) will self-organize
• Fewer than two connections per element will lead a set to die; more than 12 will result in never-ending cycling.  Between 2 and 12 connection per element and the set will self organize into a logical complex system. (I suggest reading the book for the exact details here).
• At a certain level of activity a set of elements will have a phase change.
• Catalysts are critical.
• Increasing returns are a critical component of complex systems.

To me, social networks are a clear example of complexity in action and we see the above characteristics in social networks as well:

• Left alone people will self-organize
• People will optimize productivity when they are connected but don't connect just to have more connections (i.e. each connection is a rich connection versus a superficial one)
• People who introduce people are critical to the functioning of the network as a whole
• A congregation, or subnet, can produce more value than the sum of its parts

And I haven't even finished the book.  I highly recommend the read and would love to discuss it with any of you.

Social Media Reading List

The Basics...if you don't know the general concepts in these books, get thee directly to a bookstore:

- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (Chris Anderson)

- The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)

- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Don Tapscott  and Anthony D. Williams)

- The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do - Business (Clayton M. Christensen)

- The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger)

For the more adventurous palate (in no particular order):

- Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi)

- The Social Life of Information (John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid)

- The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Lawrence Lessig)

- Networks of Software, 1990-2002: Do Web of Links Contribute to Sales? (Venkatraman, N. Venkat, Lee, Chi-Hyon and Iyer, Bala, September 2004 (softwareecosystems.com)

- The Google Legacy (Stephen  Arnold) www.infonortics.com (available in PDF only)

- The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (John Battelle)

- Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Irving L. Janis)

- What is Web 2.0? (Tim O'Reilly) www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228

- The Economics of Information Technology (Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro)

- Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

- Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. (Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro)

- Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks (Peter A Gloor)

- The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business Economies, Societies and Nations (James Surowiecki)

- Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy (Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite)

- Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel)

- Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing (Bryan Eisenberg,, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis)

- Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life -- From Sex, Violence, and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities (William Allman)

- The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom)

- We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business (Barry Libert and Jon Spector)

- The Living Company (Arie De Geus)