Soul Food for Business

I am hardly surprised at the findings of an MIT study that found that IBM employees that maintained online social relationships brought additional revenue to the company's bottom line. Any business involved in building relationships between the company and 3rd parties stands to gain from employees that regularly exercise their social circles. Malcolm Gladwell drives this point home in his book "The Tipping Point", in which he treats social and business circles as environments in which information is compared to a spreading virus and people are categorized into three distinct roles in spreading that virus. The thing that impressed me most about IBM's decision was their underlying philosophy of how to deal with the phenomena of Social Networking. Rather than to assume that it was a nuisance that interfered with the mechanisms of productivity, they decided that since Social Networking was not going to vanish, they might as well try to understand it. In the end, through regulation and guidelines to set expectations, IBM turned a "problem" into a competitive edge. Bravo.