On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors

“On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors” is an article which can be find on the Harvard Business School Review website. The author of this article is Mrs Rosabeth Moss Kanter a professor at Harvard Business School, specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.
In this article Mrs Rosabeth Moss Kanter expresses her thoughts about the importance of networking in our society and more specifically she focuses on business organizations and career success.

In the 20th century, American business organizations were very formal with a vertical hierarchy. In our days, we observe that more and more companies are relying on what we call networking and horizontal organization. This evolution in the way companies are organized in without a doubt an opportunity.

Indeed, networking has become a new strength to achieve a successful career. Even more, power is now handled by what we call the “connectors”, people who seek efficiently relationships and who connecting people to one another.

It is the fact that thanks to the creation of social media tools as: communities, Facebook, Twitter, Viadeo... it has become more easier to connect to a group and build a “networking area”. However, it has been observed that personal networks are more used because they are considered as the best way to find resources quickly. That means that, for example a manager will rely more on the people he has worked with or met in his career rather than data bases of resumes resource.

To get a good networking or social capital, it mainly depends on 2 factors:

- Having a great social capital is linked to the length of organizational experience
- And it is linked to the nature of the job. For example a sales manager thanks to the nature of his job will have better chance to get a huge and efficient network than may be a financial director.

However, what is there to be remembered by this article is sentence: In essence, "She who has the best network wins."

In my opinion, it is true that we are more and more talking about the importance of networking and the power that result from it. 10 years ago we were talking about an “individualist society” and now we have come up to a “community society” were people are linking to each other.

More personally, I have observed during my internship when I was a project manager, that having a great network gives you power. For example, when organizing a congress it is important to rely on a” personal network” of suppliers because they are more efficient, and the relationship with those suppliers makes the work easier and get it done faster.

Now, it is up to everyone to create a “network area”, to be active, and even become a “connector”.