Pulling together

Tucked away in a piece about the Jerk-O-Meter was this research result:

The most remarkable thing was that we could correlate people’s behavior and proximity—who they spent time with—who were their friends. So we could do an almost perfect prediction of who were their friends. And the number of friends you had in a work group, friends defined by people you spend time with [outside work] was an almost perfect predictor of how productive the work group was. I find that fascinating. If you go to the management school here (at MIT) it’s all about leadership. The one thing you won’t hear about is, encouraging people to have friends and creating an environment that fosters that sort of social support.

Perhaps national-building efforts could take a cue from this. It's not enough to have effective leadership and stable institutions. How does one build up social networks? How does one weave social fabrics? Building and maintaining stability in the form of intangible social infrastructure is key.

Extrapolating further, a decapitation attack upon an authoritarian regime won't result in a stable society if the key thing which held it together was fear. There have to be positive motivations for societal cohesion.