I see three things missing from today's leaders. First is a vision -- an understanding of what really needs to be done. Second is the exercise of true leadership. People are afraid to step out and champion a cause because they are afraid to be held accountable -- they're afraid that they will be blasted in the media if anything goes wrong. And third, there is no strategy for dealing with the truly complex issues of our time.

Those problems are made worse by companies that are becoming less and less connected to their communities. Even a place like Minneapolis -- with its legendarily civic-minded corporate culture -- is starting to have difficulty getting business leaders to plug into social and community causes. Las Vegas is now growing by something like 6,000 people per month -- which is forcing the city to open a new school every month just to keep up with the growth. But as Wall Street investors have taken over ownership of the casinos, investment in the needs of the local community has started to lag. In Los Angeles, the problem is different, but the result is the same: Corporate management turns over so often -- every two years, there's a major change at the top of most organizations -- that there's no way that executives have time to get an understanding of the community, much less to connect with it.

Part of the problem is simply time -- it takes more time to make a connection. And part of the problem is definitional: What do people want out of their lives?

The Really Big Picture

Karen Stephenson: As an anthropologist, I hang out not only in corporate jungles, but also in real jungles. About 20 years ago, I found myself in a situation that taught me a lot about the laws of human interaction. I was in Guatemala, cutting my way into the rain forest with four other people. We were in a jeep on back roads, living off the land, when we got held up by a gang of renegade soldiers. There were seven of them and they told us to get out of the jeep and line up. I got a machine gun shoved in my ribs. I instantly knew that we were in the kind of situation that you read about: People disappear and are never heard from again, then years later, someone stumbles over some bones.

As the soldiers started taking our stuff out of the jeep, one of the people in our group, a man named Fred, began talking to the leader in a casual way. And when the soldiers had finished removing our things, Fred actually began putting them all back. He was very subtle about it: He kept talking to the leader, telling jokes, asking for directions -- until he'd put everything back. And then there was a moment that I'll never forget. It was the moment of life or death, and everybody knew it: Either the leader was going to let us go, or he was going to kill us. At that moment, he kind of gave a shrug, took a few small items from us and a couple of our machetes, and then sent us on our way.

I understood then that, while I spoke the language of that country, I didn't speak the culture. Fred spoke the culture. He knew how to use the culture to turn the situation around. Years later, when I thought back to that moment in Guatemala, it occurred to me that there are underlying patterns of interaction between humans. I have degrees in chemistry and in physics; and in those sciences we know that there are underlying patterns in how atoms and molecules behave. As I've studied organizations, I've come to conclude that when you see people networking, schmoozing, or fighting, you're seeing underlying patterns that are just as deeply embedded in human principles as is anything in physics or in chemistry. Yet these patterns don't show up in the organizational charts that people draw at work -- they're encoded in the relationships of trust that allow us to work together.

For most companies, the problem is that these relationships are invisible -- and the knowledge embedded in them is also invisible. As such, it can't be tapped. In most big companies, innovation is accidentally discovered, and just as often, innovation is accidentally lost. There are no mechanisms to reveal the relationships of trust. To compete today, you have to be innovating continuously, which means that you have to be able to see the relationships of trust inside the organization.

Once you can visualize tacit knowledge, you can do something with it. You find repeating patterns of interaction -- hot spots -- that define networks of trust and reciprocity. Once you find those hot spots, you know where to find people who are innovating. The next question is, How do you scale trust? Here's the big challenge: Technology without people won't work. People without technology won't scale. Particularly in virtual networks, where you are working with people you've never met, you have to find a way to create trust and to scale it across the network.