The following is an exercise in network evolution. Consider the movie A Few Good Men. Choose five stars from that movie. Treat these stars as hubs of an emerging network. Add one (primary) actor to each star who did not play in the Good Men movie. Connect these new actors to any of the hubs on the basis of their playing together in the same movie. Add one (secondary actor) to each primary actor via movies that they played in together. Connect the secondary actors to other primary actors and to hubs on the basis that this likely pairing played in the same movie.

Continue one more time with (tertiary) actors and their links with existing nodes in the network. How many links do you have? How many movies did you use? What is the topology of this network? Are the original hubs actually hubs in this network, or are they peripheral?

If we used this evolutionary method using corporations and not actors, and contracts rather than movies to be the network links or ties, what lessons could we learn about the corporate networking world and the well-being of a corporation on any given landscape? Given that corporations are essentially hierarchical in nature yet the landscape is not, are there any implications for corporate governance?