Vinci is divided into three thousand compact business units, two-thirds of which have fewer than a hundred employees. So strong is the commitment to disaggregation that businesses are frequently split in two as they grow.

When Rob examined the networks of the top ten thousand people in the company, Scott “was the Number 1 most overloaded person.” More than 118 people came to Scott every day for information from the three units he ran. Rob learned in one unit “78 people—some 50 percent—of the 150 top managers in that one unit felt they couldn’t hit their business goals unless they got more of Scott’s time.

Multiple studies confirm this—most of us like being helpful. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. We are social creatures, and helping one another is one of the things that makes us feel best. Kurt didn’t know his way around the sustainable architecture industry in Atlanta. You may not know your way around the nanotechnology community in Hong Kong, or the craft beer crowd in Wichita, or the emergency-room nursing union in Seattle. What do you do? You ask a local for directions. Getting referrals to people whose stories would be useful to hear is just the professional equivalent of asking directions. So go ahead—ask for directions. It’s. No. Big. Deal. “Network” is more noun than verb. The point isn’t to “do” network-ing; the goal is to participate in the network. Simply put, it just means to enter into a particular community that’s having a particular conversation (such as sustainable architecture). Every domain of human endeavor is held together by a web of relationships between people. Real people. That web is the fabric that undergirds, contains, and holds together that part of society. The Stanford “network” that we are a part of holds Stanford together. The Silicon Valley “network” is the loose community of West Coast folk that allows tech entrepreneurship to flourish. Most individuals have both a professional network (of colleagues) and a personal network (of friends and family).

McCracken’s “grow by 50 percent” is classic bad strategy. It is the kind of nonsense that passes for strategy in too many companies. First, he was setting a goal, not designing a way to deal with his company’s challenge. Second, growth is the outcome of a successful strategy, and attempts to engineer growth are exercises in magical thinking. In this case, the growth SGI engineered was accomplished by rolling up a number of other firms whose workstation strategies had also run out of steam.

Stafford Beer takes an approach to this problem that helps to mark the distinction between information theory and cybernetics. That solution is to say that information and action are one and the same; variety coming in from the environment, or being transferred from one system to another, only counts as ‘information’ if it has a causal role in decision-making. Otherwise it’s just ‘data’ — collections of facts that hang around on disk drives, waiting to be erased* or for the format to become obsolete.

*There are a lot of people is Silicon Valley who might do well to consider how much money they have invested in ‘data’ without bearing this distinction in mind.