Call to mind the most successful project you've ever been involved with. Good. Now think about what made it work. Five TeamNet Principles, are common to networks of all sizes in all sectors: Unifying Purpose, Independent Members, Voluntary Links, Multiple Leaders, and Integrated Levels. Check your project against these principles.

• Network Principles in Brief
• Pattern Language for Organizing
• Social-Technical Networks
• Technology of the Information Age

Networks-the organizations once considered fringe phenomena-now are moving to center stage.

We have focused on networks and networking for 15 years, gathering information and insights, developing theory, testing it through practice, and writing about it-which provoked more information, theory, practice, and writing. We see five key organizing principles for the 21st century:

• Unifying Purpose
  Purpose is the glue and the driver. Common views, values, and goals hold a network together. Shared focus on desired results keeps a network in synch and on track.
• Independent Members
  Independence is a prerequisite for interdependence. Each member of the network, whether a person, company, or country, can stand on its own while benefiting from being part of the whole.
• Voluntary Links
  Just add links. The distinguishing feature of networks is their links, far more profuse and omni-directional than in other types of organization. As communication pathways increase, people and groups interact more. As more relationships develop, trust strengthens, which reduces the cost of doing business and generates greater opportunities.
• Multiple Leaders
  Fewer bosses, more leaders. Networks are leaderful, not leaderless. Each person or group in a network has something unique to contribute at some point in the process. With more than one leader, the network as a whole has great resiliency.
• Integrated Levels
  Networks are multi-leveled, not flat. Lumpy with small groups and clustered with coalitions, networks involve both the hierarchy and the "lower-archy," which leads them to action rather than simply making recommendations to others.

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The word "network" evokes a clear and simple mental model, a structure of points or circles and connecting lines-nodes and links, vibrant with activity. People intuitively use the idea with a remarkable consistency that continues to surprise us. Where people do get fuzzy is how a network actually does anything coherent.

You already practice many of the principles. By simply upgrading your informal network knowledge and translating experience into a concise language, you will enhance your capabilities immediately. Longer term, if you work with the principles and they work for you, you will gain the keys to networking with its near universal applicability.

We began our search for principles when we started our research in 1979 and it continues today. Networking (Doubleday, 1982), our first book, included ten principles, five on structure and five on process. Later, we reduced our set to a barebones three-members (more generally called nodes), links, and purpose. More experience, examples, and thinking have led us to the current five.

• Purpose
• Members
• Links
• Leaders
• Levels

This set of patterns is not sacred, but we have reviewed, tested, and seen them practiced extensively in every sector-business, non-profit, grass-roots, government, religious, education-and with all sizes of networks.

Indeed, the great advantage of such time-worn general principles is their enormous power of applicability. Principles allow you to take learning from one situation and transfer it to another. People use principles at every level to design human-scale networks to meet their needs, while combining into ever larger associations that reflect the same elements and dynamics.

Start small. Each stable intermediate level of a network is independent and complex, especially that of the small group. Networks scale.

No matter how exalted our role-royalty, board chair, or president, we all live in small groups. Small groups of people represent the largest of organizations, embody corporations, and stand for the interests of entire industries. Little organizations make up big organizations. Everyone comes home at night to a small group, if only an extended one. Each of us plays many roles at many levels in many different groups.

What roles do you play at what levels? Seeing how you fit in to your own picture is the first step to understanding the networks around you.

Apply the principles to the group closest to you personally and begin simply. Experiment with your own small group at work. Hold an informal planning session with a few close colleagues to try out the new ideas. Try the pocket tool outside of work: help a local school, church, temple, or community group.

Through experience, you become a more astute observer of the organizational landscape. You learn by noticing what's happening in other companies. You recognize common features in how non-business organizations are coping with the transition from industry to information. See how others:

• translate vision into work;
• develop independent work units;
• establish rich connections;
• encourage multiple leaders; and
• involve the hierarchy.

Suddenly, you become aware of things you haven't seen before. Like the article in your trade publication about how a group of companies like yours is talking about forming an alliance that expands capabilities and enlarges the customer base. Perhaps you can join, or form the nucleus for a new network.

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Some organizations lead the journey into the Age of the Network. Their businesses are natural networks; their core technology is highly networked.

In the case of Arthur Andersen & Co., similar to other large professional service businesses, the partners and associates are naturally spread out across clusters of local offices. These firms are also leaders in applying information technology to knowledge work. Likewise, "service webs" spread out in natural networks-such as Domino's Pizza and other franchises that combine local entrepreneurism with extensive, distributed information systems. Hyatt Hotels manages a far-flung network of hotels and owners with an integrated brand, marketing, and management skills.

From a technology perspective, process manufacturing, rather than discrete manufacturing, requires more organic management. The horizontal, networked nature of Eastman Chemical Company's work figuratively appears in the maze of pipes and tanks-processes and flows-of their production facilities. Federal Express created a network to provide a delivery service. AT&T's natural network technology, turned loose into the marketplace to face the full pace of change, has impelled it into leadership among the giants in developing new ways of working. "AT&T is the most incredibly flexible large organization I've ever dealt with," says GO's CEO Bill Campbell. "You don't need to go to committees. Somebody makes a decision, and we move on to the next one."

While some organizations network more naturally than others, virtually all are incorporating new electronic technologies.

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With the invention of electronic circuits, the ideas of George Boole, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and others became the seminal technology for the Age of the Network. Chips, circuits, satellites-the ever-expanding array of electronics-restructures old markets and opens up whole new ones. Information, computer technologies, and global markets require networks. Hierarchy alone is too rigid, and bureaucracy is just too slow.

• New ideas turn into new technologies.
• New technologies open up new economies.
• New ideas, technologies, and economies provoke new organizations.

Information technology first emerged at the peak of the Industrial Age. Not surprisingly, it looked appropriately mechanistic and the first few generations of computers were enormous. Their user interfaces were hideously complex and awesomely expensive, available to only the largest of institutions. The central computer-with its professional priesthood who alone understood its arcane mysteries-needed to shared to be cost effective, so it sprouted dependent appendages, numbingly similar dumb terminals. The whole system collapsed when the mainframe went down behind air conditioned glass walls set on raised floors.

Next came the chip. It leaked from the lab in the 1970s to the marketplace before anyone really knew what was happening. Instantly, a revolution from below erupted with hobbyist kits like the Altair, gathered speed with the Apple II, and, finally exploded with the IBM "personal computer."

Personal computers completely liberated the information revolution from mainframe domination. PCs are an agent of personal empowerment at the technological heart of the age. You and your computer are independent members with autonomous capabilities, archetype nodes in social/technology networks.

PCs linked into networks almost immediately. Networks have traveled from a fringe curiosity to the central architecture of computing in no more than a decade. PCs, linked into local-area networks (LANs) and wide-area networks (WANs), as well as directly to the global Internet, reflect the robustness of the network design. If the broader networks go down, the local clusters still function. If local nets go down, PCs and other devices continue to function and have capability to work.

A 1985 publication by Digital Equipment Corporation, then the world's leader in developing networking technology, provided this definition, still representative of this techno-genre:

"A network comprises two or more intelligent devices linked in order to exchange information and share resources."

Here we see three essential elements of the Five Teamnet Principles-nodes, links, and purpose. The nodes are the independent intelligent devices, the members. They are linked physically to serve purposes, the "in order to" of exchanging information and sharing resources. Networks come to life for a purpose, the business needs that specific applications meet.

Technology networks also reflect the last two of the Five Teamnet Principles. Some nodes in technology networks serve as leaders, "servers," as they literally are known, which contain shared information, such as databases, and perform routing functions, such as delivering electronic mail. Ironically, mainframes now have a renewed role in computer life, as "servers" rather than "masters." Technology networks also make use of experts and administrators whose jobs are to maintain and protect the infrastructure, develop its capabilities, and resolve conflicts.

Levels appear throughout computer technology-hardware, software, and wiring schemes alike. At the user interface, hierarchical menus offer people the means to interact with a "machine" made of chips constructed from ephemeral Boolean logic gates-sets-within-sets-within-sets.