WHAT:  SLA Virtual Seminar - Impacting Information Flows in Your Organization.  The speaker will be Rob Cross, Ph.D.  Mr. Cross is an assistant professor of management at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. His research focuses on knowledge creation and sharing and specifically how relationships and informal networks in organizations can provide competitive advantage in knowledge-intensive work.  Ideas emerging from this work have resulted in four book chapters and 18 articles, some of which have won awards at the Academy of Management. In addition to top scholarly outlets, this work has been featured in such venues as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Academy of Management Executive and Organizational Dynamics. He is also the author of two books: Networks in the Knowledge Economy (Oxford University Press) and The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations (Harvard Business School Press). 

In today's flatter organizations work of significance demands effective collaboration within and across functional, physical and hierarchical boundaries. However, while often concerned with external relationships, executives generally pay little attention to assessing and supporting linkages among employees within their own organizations. This presentation will demonstrate why and how executives must pay attention to the health of networks within their organizations based on in-depth experience with over 60 organizations in the last five years. Specifically, this session will:

· Demonstrate the importance of networks in terms of performance (organizational and individual), learning, innovation and quality of work life.

· Provide case examples of strategic problems organizations uncover when conducting a social network analysis and means of correcting them.

· Characterize networks of high performing individuals and provide diagnostic questions that people can apply to assess their own networks.

· Describe new work assessing energy in networks, both how it is created and transferred as well as its impact on performance and innovation.