For executives to know what is happening within their companies, they should chart informal hierarchies that exist outside the traditional pyramids of power.

        In other words, some people have more ability to motivate co-workers — or demotivate them — than titles or roles would imply.

        Karen A. Stephenson, an anthropologist and professor of management at Harvard University, believes astute leaders need to identify those key people before making significant changes.

        A management swami for companies such as Hughes Aircraft, AOL Time-Warner, IBM and TRW Inc., she is the guest lecturer at an event sponsored by the Center for Adaptive Management at 8 a.m. Thursday. The event at Montgomery Inn Banquet Center, 601 E. Pete Rose Way, costs $125. Tickets are available at the door. For more information, call 563-4434.

        Ms. Stephenson, chief executive of NetForm International Inc., and visiting professor at Imperial College at the University of London, spoke with Enquirer reporter John Eckberg:

        Question: If the people who are the chatty ones, the gatekeepers, hubs and pulse takers, get laid off, won't other hubs, gatekeepers and pulse takers take their place and the organization will sail on renewed and reinvigorated?

        Answer: Yes, there is natural knowledge progression, but if all your top-tier people leave at once, the top 5 percent, it is too much of a shock to the networks. Because it is a shock to the networks, it can sometimes destroy a culture.

        When people are asking me in the government to find and destroy terrorist networks, that's what we do. We try to find all of the top 5 percent and take them out at once because that will be effective. In an organization, one can leave or a couple can leave but not all of that 5 percent can leave at once or it will be too difficult for the network to recover.

        Q: Have you worked internationally on the terrorist network problem or is your focus domestic?

        A: It's international. These terrorist networks are everywhere. You have to be able to see the structure of these networks, and if can't see it then you have to come up with methods to deduce the structure.

        It's not unlike what we do in organizations but there it is for positive and proactive reasons.

        Even when we deduce network structures to find fraud, we are trying to find fraud to protect the people before they commit the fraud. They are very smart and very innovative and we want them to stay with the organization instead of going to jail. We try to find folks who are creatively manipulating and finessing the system and point them in the right direction.

        This methodology is restorative in nature and regenerative.

        Q: Does the methodology evolve? Is it synergistic?. Does it evolve and change as you move through the deductive process?

A: The methodology has evolved over a 30-year period. The basic scientific principles of network structures remain the same. The methodology has improved because computers have improved. Visualization techniques have dramatically changed and the Internet and access to the information has changed.

        As business becomes increasingly aware that its culture is run not by hierarchy but by networks, a growing self-awareness has led to more sophisticated questions that home in on specific applications such as: mergers and acquisitions, forms of restructuring, how to tell your consumer what and where to buy, how do I pay for performance strategically, how do I design a better office and workplace environment.

        Q: Information is gathered through interviews with employees?

        A: In the early days, yes. Now because we're scanning for dimensions of knowledge, it becomes like an MRI. It's X-ray slices of an organization or social body. It's taking slices of knowledge, innovation, expertise, decision-making, issues like that.

        All of those slices when taken together make up the body of an organization. You ask a series of questions targeted at those dimensions and those are really the networks of that dimension. You ask maybe seven to 10 questions. We have 15 that really cover all but we never ask that many because we don't want to tire people out.

        We ask who people work with along various dimensions of knowledge. There is nothing proprietary about the data collection methodology except that we are probably ahead of the market from the sophisticated tools we use.

        The optimization and measurement of these organizational networks is very proprietary. We've honed that over 30 years and constantly test against a database of over 300 examples.

        Q: You're trained as an anthropologist and have lived as a cultural explorer in distant places: the Sahara, the jungles of Latin America, in life-threatening situations. Any broad-brush conclusions about the American workplace and parallels to tribes?

        A: I'm trained as a scientist, in chemistry, in physics and mathematics. I have undergraduate degrees in chemistry and art. I have a master's in the mathematical modeling of human groups.

        The workplace is going to be the icon for the new millennium in the way people think about culture and how they get along. The workplace is changing in place and space. It's virtual.

        I've gone off and spent many years in the jungles of the Yucatan and the Sahara in Egypt, doing unauthorized classical research. I just went out and did it and became good at it. People like National Geographic would pay me to find hidden treasure.

        That work prepared me for this kind of organizational work. I don't see what goes on inside of organizations as being too terribly different from what goes on in non-industrial tribal societies. Basically, people are calculating. They're trying to figure out their relations to one another, whether that's biology or fictional relations like organizational charts.

        People in head-hunting societies didn't have much violence at all, even though they were head-hunters. We're far more violent in some ways in our corporations. We physically don't go out and kill people but neither did tribal people. They did it ritualistically and we do it ritualistically as well.

        We hunt heads. We take people down professionally. The behavior is the same even behind the scenes. I don't think productivity and performance is a lifesaver either. What happens is that if you are very good at what you do, sometimes you are a target by those who would be jealous and have to take you down.

        I want to believe that the workplace can be a meritocracy and have always strived for that ideal. You know what they say, a cynic is a frustrated idealist.

        Even though I speak somewhat cynically about these realities, I fundamentally am an idealist and believe that you can create meritocracies and pay people for performance and have them aligned around objectives and goals.

        Q: Flow in the workplace seems to be a pretty fleeting and capricious thing.

        A: It is but when you have it, you look back on it. I keep my eye on the prize and the prize is always the idea. You can heed but don't concede to politics.

        Keep your eye on the idea because there is authenticity around an idea, and people can never mistake your devotion and service to an idea as having anything to do with a personal agenda.

Networks key to healthy workplace
ECKBERG: Layoffs don't mean no hiring
Scammers try to cash in on attack
All-in-one handheld debuts today
Madonna pitches Windows XP
The Success Coach
Morning Memo
Promotions & new on the job