CAN THE WEB SAVE THE WORLD?

[Michael Grove]

    IF Hillary Clinton had been elected the US president last year,

    Anne-Marie Slaughter would probably be holding a key

    government post right now. But Slaughter, who worked in

    the State Department during Clinton’s tenure there and is

    now the president of New America, instead faces life as a

    foreign policy observer and thinker during a time when the

    president doesn’t seem like someone much given to observing

    or thinking. Slaughter’s writing extends to other areas as well;

    she is perhaps best known for her Atlantic cover story...

   “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”

     Slaughter’s new book is called The Chessboard and the Web:

    Strategies of Connection in a Networked World. In it, she

    calls on leaders to look beyond the “chessboard” of our

    nation-state rivalries (which she acknowledges do still exist)

    and focus more attention on the “web”: the place where

    states and people must develop their own networks of

    communication and community, to prevent everything

    from terrorism to global warming.

       

                                                    Isaac Chotiner is a Slate staff writer.

                                                                                                 

THE ANSWER according to Angela Ahrendt's concept of

The Power of Human Energy • IS an indefatigable YES

            Anne-Marie Slaughter goes on to say in her interview with

       Isaac Chotiner ... "I have been writing about networks since

       1994, and have been struck for a long time by the absence

       of tools that really allow us to use networks strategically,

       and that was something I saw firsthand in government.

       So when I came out of government I returned to the subject.

       What we normally do when we are confronted with a network

       problem is we think, 'Oh WE need to bring people together.'

       So counterterrorism officials, or entrepreneurs, or members

       of a religious community have a meeting or a summit. BUT

       what WE don’t DO is keep people connected and keep them

       connected in a particular way with a particular architecture.

       There is a lot of theory out there about how you design a

       network to achieve a specific purpose. The military has done

       this, and I write about how Gen. [Stanley] McChrystal, the

       head of Special Forces Command in Iraq, who figured out how

       to create a counter-network to al-Qaida in Iraq; and in so

       doing established the concept of a T.E.A.M. of teams. That

       means connecting everybody so everyone in every small

       group had at least one connection to someone in another

       small group. And that network came together as a massive

       network, what I would call a star network with one center for

       communications purposes. But then it became what you

       would call a pod network, with different teams of people

       who are quite independent for operations. He essentially

       mirrored the structure of the al-Qaida in Iraq network & you

       don’t just change the structure but how you operate and

       how you manage."

        

 

 

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