I came across* a thought-provoking observation from Bob Metcalfe in 1981 He said:
"There are two kinds of people in the data processing world: (1) those who draw a box with lines coming out of it; and (2) those who draw a line with boxes coming off of it. The former are computer-centric, the latter network-centric."
The box-with-lines crowd, we meet everyday. They see the world through PowerPoint templates and org charts, and fit everything into templates. They're not comfortable with, er, linking outside the template! The line-with-boxes people understand the value of networks, interaction, and don't care where the next idea comes from, whether it's from the programmer, the receptionist, or gleaned off the dust jacket of a book on someone's desk.
One of the ideas of Metcalfe's Law, ("the community value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users increase") as you may know, anticipated and probably seeded the idea for Web 2.0 applications such as Flikr, LinkedIn, Digg, YouTube and more recently, WriteBoard, and NoteMesh.
I enjoy working with network-centric people. There's hardly a day when someone from outside the org chart of my everyday work doesn't ask, task, share, or collaborate. Without such inputs, marketers and communicators would be easily replaced by machines, or drones.
* The Metcalfe quote was in a very good article at MarketingProfs, by Roger von Oech.
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