Posted on 07/16/2009 6:31:01 AM PDT by BGHater
How is it possible for a small number of newcomers to displace a well-established group of leaders?
That's not just a question for military organizations wanting to overthrow governments; it's a question for political parties controlling national debates, new products displacing well-established market leaders, and flocking birds following leaders to new food sources.
Social scientists have studied the nature of effective leadership for centuries with limited success. Physicists, on the other hand, are new to the party, which gives them a chance to nab some low-hanging fruit. Today, Hai-Tao Zhang at the University of Cambridge, in the U.K., and a few buddies say that they have grabbed a particularly juicy piece by revealing a key strategy of effective leadership.
One way to model leadership (or flocking, as ornithologists call it) is to create a computer-based swarm of individuals who follow the average movement of those around them. When you introduce a small number of leaders who all move in a certain direction--to the right, say--the swarm tends to follow the leaders.
How, then, can a smaller number of left-moving leaders take control of the swarm? At first glance, it looks as if they can't. But Hai-Tao Zhang and buddies prove otherwise. They identify two new qualities of leadership that determine the result. The first is the ability to distribute a leader's influence to as many followers within a given time. The second is the ability to be sufficiently persuasive to change and hold the allegiance of followers who they can influence.
When these factors come into play, the balance of power depends on the distribution of leaders. What Hai-Tao Zhang and pals show is that it is possible for power seekers to spread their influence to as many followers as possible in a given time and to accumulate enough power to govern these followers. This allows the power seekers to defeat the dominating leaders solely by optimizing their distribution pattern, even when they are fewer in number than their opposition.
So the key to seizing power, or at least gaining a significant foothold, is the effective distribution of a small number of leaders within a larger group. "A better distribution pattern has larger influential region and greater clustering factor, which can equip the leaders with the capability of influencing more followers in a given period and strengthening the persuasion power on the followers as well," says the team.
That's an interesting idea that may explain the effectiveness of Internet-based grassroots campaigns, both political and commercial, which we have seen in recent years. The take-home point here is that it's not just what you're saying that's important: it's how you distribute your message.
This kind of thinking could have a profound effect on everything from grassroots movements to guerrilla marketing to the way that big companies are run.
And of course, there may be an interest in the next iteration of this idea in which established leaders ask how they can maintain a status quo given the infiltration of a small number of power-seeking interlopers.
Fascinating stuff.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0907.1317: Effective Leadership in Competition
Yes, that's one way.
“America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to just shoot the bastards.” --- opening lines of “101 Things To Do ‘Til The Revolution by Claire Wolfe
1. Find a parade,
2. Get around in front of it, stepping off smartly and to the beat of the march, and
3. Glance over your shoulder from time to time to see if anybody is still back there.
Could this be labeled “Hope and Change.”
Where is our military, which has taken an oath to defend the country from enemies “both foreign and DOMESTIC”?
have a sycophant, complicit media?
You can see this with the “social revolution” of gay marriage. We’re on the verge of nationwide same sex marriage because of the actions of a few key activists.
The same happened in the ‘60s with the hippies changing our culture. The vast majority of young people were not into the drugs and anti-war and sexual revolutions. But there too, our culture was changed.
The women’s movement, abortion rights, and others, can trace their success to small numbers of key people making things happen.
And wasn’t the Bolshevik Revolution carried out by relatively small numbers of Russians? Wasn’t it Lenin who said, you should use useful idiots in pursuit of your goals? Then, cast them aside when your work is done?
I think that part of what happens is that activists have the biggest mouths. And, in the case of liberal causes, they enlist the aid of the liberal elites in academia and the MSM. How many college professors are against gay marriage for example? How many MSM editorials have you read against gay marriage? This is an issue which the liberal elites are pushing and they will probably succeed, as other such issues, starting with small support, also succeeded.
bfltr
Ah, so Obomba's strategy with "czars" is outed.
Step one - almost completed
Step 2 - Already completed. Just look at the individuals STILL bowing to "The One".
I'd argue this this many not be true any more.
Nice kiity...it looks like the feline’s answer to Sgt. Elias in the movie “Platoon”.
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