Community
What is a community?

A community is a group with a binding factor

There are many types of communities; a company could be considered a financial community because the prime reason for the group to be assembled is money. Employees work to earn money themselves and the company works to reward shareholders.

In the Information Age, more and more communities will form within and between companies. Examples of these communities are project groups or committees, but this binding factor could be anything from the department name, the floor they work on, or even a similar hobby or interest. Communities will enable people to enjoy their work more, thereby ultimately proving positive for both the employee and the employer.

Communities play a vital role in the transfer of knowledge. Communities can also help people become more inclined to take innovative decisions because these decisions are affirmed and supported by the community. Building communities between companies also has many advantages as people are able to communicate with like-minded colleagues. Additionally, employees are less likely to defect from one community to another; since they already have the advantages of having close contact with the other group there is little incentive to change.

Companies should be careful to value non-work related communities that offer no apparent benefit to the company, since these communities are formed from many different parts of the company instead of the parts which would normally communicate anyway. These social communities have a very strong bonding effect. If people meet out of work, they start thinking of their colleagues as friends, thus making the overall company more coherent and creating an environment of tolerance, respect and mutual understanding. It is amazing to consider that 'Water Cooler Talk' is still often discouraged by the managers of yesterday, while online chat rooms and discussion forums of today provide the same functionality and huge benefits if the information from these communities are properly managed.

Communities play a vital role in the success of knowledge companies and companies that are successful in building communities within their organisation will become stronger. Unfortunately for a company it is not possible to 'make' a community. One can, however, foster an environment where the creation of communities is promoted. This means that companies could choose to sponsor communities, for example by paying for travel expenses, an inspiring recreational area, or providing time off. By involving people more into these communities, the positive effect is increased.

Whilst not purposely created, a well known example of a beneficial social community is the group of smokers. This community consists of haphazardly thrown together people from all parts of the company. These people often discuss work-related issues with one another and thus freely exchange knowledge. In this way, people know more about each other and what the rest of the company is doing. As an advertisement by a photocopier manufacturer once stated, "It's OK for your employees to talk by the photocopier, as long as they're not talking about the photocopier."

Companies need to perform a great number of different tasks, requiring different skills. This means that for each task or project, a group of different skills. For each task or project, a group of people will be formed who collectively possess specific skills required to complete the given task. Those members of these groups may differ per project thus creating a new community.

It is likely that people will be working on more than one project at a time, and therefore, they can belong to several different communities. They may be the leader in one community, but not necessarily in others. It is clear that a traditional hierarchy with top management, lower management etc. does not fit well in the community structure. The days of strict departmental structures are disappearing, making way for these project driven groups which has a great implication for the structure and management of organizations.

It is very important to ensure that all staff have a feeling of belonging to the community by giving everyone a financial part of the company, a share in its success. It is also important to give giving every single employee their own business cards, something, which costs little but gives a tangible association and enhances the feeling of belonging. Employees who are treated in this way will give more to the community as they then see that they are an important member of the team.

Leadership is not just understanding. For over a century, workers were given dedicated jobs with dedicated tasks. The whole work flow was dependant upon the strict execution of those tasks. Tasks were handled by foremen and were often limited to ensuring that all workers followed the exact procedures as dictated by management.

To understand the changes, which are needed, it is important to understand the difference between a leader and a boss. In the industrial age, a manager or foreman was called a boss and his (virtually all managers then were men) task was to oversee production. His main concern was to keep the rate of output as high as possible, by constantly monitoring the efficiency of his staff. In the information age, the main goal is no longer to maximize the number of produced products so therefore a leader can no longer be occupied with monitoring the efficiency of staff. Most knowledge workers are very highly self-motivated so they need a leader who gives them a goal and the support or motivation that is needed.

People now know their own market value and will change jobs according to different criteria than before. Challenge and stimulation is becoming far more important than job security and even financial rewards. A happy employee with a good feeling of self-worth will not only contribute more but will be less likely to change employer. This saves the investment made in their training, etc., avoiding the high costs of recruiting a suitable replacement and loosing a source of its most valuable asset, people. The highest performing companies will be those who have the lowest staff turnover. Experience has shown that applying these concepts also results in swifter and cost efficient recruitment efforts. Todays Information Workers are often 'Free Agents' who move from company to company, making abnormal amounts of money, but clearly in search of a sense of 'belonging' to like minded people and will be willing to work for lower wages if the environment is more suitable to their personality profile, or 'PP'.

Most wealth-creating employees in knowledge companies tend to be highly intelligent, perhaps belonging to an emerging group in society called the 'inner-directed'. This group of people has recently been identified by American Express as the group of people with a high disposable income, are typically aged under 35, not interested in saving or home ownership, live to live rather than live for work and are fortunately far less risk-averse.

This group of people will no longer tolerate the old management techniques of top-down hierarchical structures, where senior managers and directors make product related policy decisions while they often have far lesser understanding of their products than their staff they employ. This notion of a rigid hierarchical structure does not work well with intelligent employees who expect more than to just be told what to do and how to do it. Young 20-something year olds often now give far more real added value to a company, yet this value is often unheard by their company due to perceived inexperience by traditional management. These wealth generating knowledge workers require a different way of guidance and motivation so they are able to excel.

A leader will guide the community, allowing it's members a certain bandwidth to stray from the path he/she has set. By allowing this space, showing people that they can make valid decisions themselves, they get more self esteem and will feel more empowered. Sometimes a leader must make people stray from the path to see how they handle the situation. He/she should put people in unfamiliar situations so that they gain more experience and self-confidence and can see that they can make valid decisions and succeed.

It must be realised that the strong companies will be the ones who impose minimal control on their staff because empowered staff do not need 'controlling', they can think for themselves and therefore need little supervision.

One should also challenge staff by promoting rotation among different positions. This will provide greater stimulation, give a broader personal knowledge base, people will become better able to react rapidly to change and will further realize their full potential. Employees will almost certainly repay the trust and time put in them with incredible loyalty.

If people are given responsibility, they will use that in a positive way for themselves by improving their decision making abilities, which also adds self-confidence, with the knock-on effect of adding more value to the company, their financial community.

The choice of community leadership should not be a top-down decision. The leader is preferably chosen by the members of the community themselves, based upon whomever has the best skills to lead the community for the job in hand.

Only by sharing can progress be made. The sharing of knowledge is one of the most important human traits. For generations, we have evolved by transferring knowledge. Only by sharing knowledge can progress be made and the Internet has expanded that information exchange to previously impossible levels.

By sharing knowledge, people gain new insights, which they can then use in analogous situations. Experience is probably the only non-transferable knowledge. Only by sharing knowledge can we evolve and more knowledge sharing means faster 'evolution'. There must be trust and mutual respect in order to share knowledge. Sharing creates a good balance in the community, from trust and respect comes balance which is otherwise not in equilibrium.

We discussed earlier that there are two types of knowledge, general and specific. In a corporate environment, one can further divide specific knowledge into two groups, 'professional' and 'corporate'. Professional knowledge is the type, which is required to perform a task, such as an understanding of UNIX, html or law. The other is corporate knowledge, which would include such things as which accounts the company is pitching for, its strategy or sales forecast.

It is important to differentiate between these two groups so as to only exchange knowledge with others that enhances your knowledge without jeopardizing either your or your companys' interests.

You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. To most people, the word 'risk' has sinister connotations of gambling or recklessness. To an information age company however, taking risk is one of the most important critical success factors as it encourages innovation. To be innovative means trying new things, and trying something new means that you don't know whether you will succeed or fail and are therefore taking a risk.

Only by taking risks do we move forward; taking no risk at all may be very secure but it means standing still with the inevitable consequence of stagnation in fast moving markets.

Knowledge will grow where people are able to take risks. This is obvious when risk is taken which turns out to be a success but it is also true with failure. Failure will also gain knowledge if the reason for failure is known, recorded and disseminated to others in the community so that they do not make the same mistakes. Because of this it is vital that failure is acceptable in the community, otherwise people will cover up their mistakes instead of openly analysing and learning from them. Failure must be seen as a lesson to the community and not as one individuals' problem.

In our own company failure is turned into learning by a process that used to be called a 'Post Mortem', meaning after death. To remove the negative implications of this term, the phrase 'Sunset Review' was put into place resulting in immediate benefit as all participants agreed through informal surveying that the Sunset Review provided more positive learning from mistakes and failure than the traditional Post Mortem.

Unfortunately most people are far too risk averse and hold themselves and their company back, often due to a lack of self confidence. It's not that most people don't have the ability to make quality decisions, more that they are not confident that they will succeed and therefore take the secure option, ie the one for which they will not get into trouble. An example is the IT manager who buys a grossly over-specified computer which perhaps costs ten times that of a machine which will do the job effectively. Or a housewife who always cooks meals consisting of meat, potatoes and vegetables, rather than trying out new, exotic recipes. The reality is that taking the 'safe' option is usually the wrong one, because it's missing an opportunity for improvement. This is especially true for knowledge companies.

Management risk taking comes in several forms. The most important is the 'guts' to initiate an carry out a project or fund R&D. Another is the empowerment of employees. Empowering employees to make their own decisions and implement those actions is essential to knowledge companies. The industrial age concept of leading from the top down does not work well in dynamic knowledge companies that typically employ very intelligent people. It is interesting to note that most 'old school' senior managers or directors often have a far lesser understanding of their products than the staff they employ, yet in many companies these managers make most decisions. It is imperative to delegate effectively, standing by the actions of all employees without retribution to an individual for mistakes. This is essential for the morale and creativity of the entire team.

Innovation stems from people taking risks, but that doesn't mean that taking risk is always a good thing. It is necessary to perform risk assessment: find related information, assess the chance of success, the yield in case of success, the risk of failure, and the maximum damage in a 'worst case scenario'. Then take the decision. The decision making process is best done by humans, machines are best at capturing and disseminating information.

The conclusion is that you don't necessarily need to take risk, but you must be able to take risk.