Clay Christensen stresses that managers are voracious consumers of theory. In other words, they value ways to think about their world, and mental tools that will let them make decisions and predictions with a level of confidence higher than they get from experience and intuition alone.

But the intersection of ties and Enterprise 2.0 technologies goes much farther than this. In fact, ties provide a great base for understanding the benefits provided by many E2.0 technologies, and for understanding when each one should be deployed. Thinking in terms of ties, in other words, let managers select from among the grabbag of available technologies and also anticipate the benefits they’ll get after successful deployment.

The benefit of blogs becomes much more clear when they’re seen as tools to convert potential ties, strong or weak, into actual ones.

I’m hearing from a lot of people that late 2007 is much like late 1997.