I am back from a sabbatical year in Shanghai with my family, thanks to University President Shirley Tilghman, and also Acting Dean Nolan McCarty—and the School’s administrative staff—who ran a tight ship in my absence and steered it skillfully toward a set of common goals.

One of the things I did while in China was read about networks. I wrote a book on global networks of national government officials in 2004; since then, a whole new crop of business books have come out about “managing in a horizontal (e.g. networked) environment.” A number of foreign policy books emphasize the difficulty of countering networks of everything from terrorists to traffickers in women and children; and books on the changing nature of government in the 21st century note the emergence of global policy and service networks of public, private, and non-profit actors. I also learned a lot about the networks that make the Association of Southeast Asian Nations run.
Here are some of the reflections I brought back to Princeton. First, the Princeton alumni network in Asia is very strong. Princeton-in-Asia (PIA), a program that places people in one-year jobs across Asia right after they graduate, takes applications from many different universities other than Princeton, but it is still over half Princeton alums and is a great source of contacts and knowledge about opportunities in different countries. More broadly, the Princeton Clubs in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all vibrant and a great first stop for Princetonians in Asia looking for friends, jobs, or both.

Second, the best way to expand opportunities for our students and faculty abroad, in my view, is to support faculty members who want to build research networks of scholars in other countries or across a particular region. I visited universities in Japan, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Australia and Hong Kong as well as in many parts of China. I emphasized our desire to make contact at the faculty level and support networks that would engage students on an ongoing basis. For example, WWS professor Katherine Newman has built a research network across Europe—and now to Japan—on inequality that allows graduate students to study at multiple foreign universities, and hosts foreign faculty members and students back at Princeton.

Finally, William Fung ’70 is one of the partners in Li and Fung, the largest and most successful sourcing company in the world. In a new book Fung and his co-authors describe the critical skill of
“orchestrating networks,” linking different partners around the world at different times to produce different products to a common standard. Orchestration differs from management in a vertical organization. It purportedly “requires a more fluid approach that empowers partners and employees, yet demands that control be maintained at the same time.”¹

With that model in mind, I see the many problems America’s government faces, from education to healthcare to climate change, from counterterrorism to nonproliferation to poverty reduction, and contemplate the reduced capacity of the public sector to address them. Thus, the School has organized a task force on the Changing Nature of Government Service, headed by Paul Volcker ’49, which will issue a report in December on what the government and schools of public policy need to do to ensure that our government attracts and retains the level of talent necessary to serve both the country and the world effectively.

One of the answers, in my view, is to identify and develop the skills necessary to orchestrate networks of public, private, and non-profit actors working for the public good. One of the things I didn’t manage to get to on my sabbatical was to join the social networking generation; I have a profile on MySpace that I barely know how to use. I did figure out, however, that from a networked perspective, the world is really OurSpace; part of our job, here at the Woodrow Wilson School, is to harness networks of all kinds to make it a better space.

^{1 Victor K. Fung, William K. Fung and Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton Publishing, 2007), 11.}