January 4, 2011 | Editor’s note: L. Gregory Jones spoke Nov. 20, 2010, during the commencement ceremony for the Global Executive MBA program at the Fuqua School of Business. This address easily adapts to the challenges and opportunities facing Christian institutional leaders, as noted in the links provided in the piece.

What I want to do is to reflect with you about the kind of education that the world needs in the 21st century and actually what are the most essential of the qualities of leadership regardless of the organizations you are part of or entrusted to lead. I want to give you three brief images on which you can hang your hat, drawn from a surprising convergence in recent writings about innovation and leadership. The first is networking, the second is border crossing and the third is staying on pitch.

First, networking. The image of being a networker in many ways conjures up images of those rather slimy people you want to avoid at a cocktail party -- the people who, as soon as they come up and introduce themselves and tell you their great accomplishments, are looking over your shoulder to see if there’s somebody more important they might be able to meet very quickly thereafter. I want to redeem the image of being a networker in at least one sense.

Networking in its best sense is what it means when you connect people in new ways that make innovation and experimentation possible. I want to use an image from Steven Johnson’s latest book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.” Johnson paints a picture of Charles Darwin, on a calm day in 1836 on the Keeling Islands, going out to a coral reef and finding in that coral reef an extraordinary constellation of life. Darwin noticed that in areas of the water not too far from that coral reef, there was no life at all. When he went back onto dry land on the Keeling Islands, he found very little life there either. What he recognized was that there was a constellation of networks that actually made life rich -- able to multiply and to discover new possibilities. Networking creates what Johnson calls “adjacent possibles.”

Johnson suggests that it’s about people coming together who otherwise wouldn’t know each other and then seeing the ideas, the relationships, the questions, the disagreements, the ways in which people press against each other and with each other, spend late nights wondering with each other, and early mornings sometimes apologizing to each other. It’s the sheer journey.

But networkers in this sense are people who make more life possible because the connections are both broad and deep. Those networks have been extended and expanded by technology, and Fuqua’s pioneering work of place and space education brings together in the most dynamic pedagogical way I know of, on the one hand, face-to-face interaction, the embodied ways in which you get close enough to each other and to particular cultures to get a sense of the smells and the ways in which people’s movements affect you and sometimes stimulate you and sometimes annoy you, and, on the other hand, networks of technology that supplement that capacity, which means that you have to wake up early in the morning or somebody else has to stay up late at night to converse, where being involved in a global program you discover that you get as many e-mails while you’re asleep as you do while you’re awake.

The networks multiply the possibilities for relationship; and the times of renewing them in embodied interaction, supplemented with technological interaction, provide an explosion of possibility, or what Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus.” That’s where innovation, new ideas, new ways of thinking about your current work, new opportunities explode.

Two quick images. One, Johnson describes a recent study by McGill University researchers who actually put cameras in laboratories of individual scientists, molecular biologists, and then they had cameras in the rooms where the scientists would gather to engage in discussion about their science. What they discovered was that the genuine breakthroughs consistently happened not as the scientists themselves thought, working in the labs, but consistently around the conference rooms as they talked about what they were learning.

It was simply the most recent example of what Randall Collins found in his study “The Sociology of Philosophies,” a big-sounding big book that’s not worth reading except the conclusive finding: that intellectual breakthroughs across the history of the world, across cultures around the world, consistently have depended upon sustained relationships of people from diverse backgrounds interacting with one another over time.

But there’s a problem. In this world of the Internet and networks of relationships, it’s also now increasingly possible for us not to be like Darwin’s coral reef but to be of a different kind of animal species, the one known as birds of a feather, liking to flock together. The potential of these kinds of networks we now can create means we also can find ourselves creating only networks with like-minded people whom we already agree with and who will reinforce our own sentiments and prejudices, likes and dislikes.