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Tuesday September 16, 2008

Is Business a Community?

Yesterday, a debate ensued about whether business is a community.

It is not said one party; community is this soft thing and business is fundamentally about the results that a company creates. Results, as in money. That’s it. Bottom line.

But is that really the whole story? I would argue that business is about community because together this combination of workers toil in the exchange of ideas thas creates something. That something either directly or indirectly contributes to “creating value”. Leaders help to create the context and culture where this exchange of ideas happens, and they also create a culture where beliefs about “what matters” are held in common. Held in common, as in held by community.

Without a community of people joined together, you couldn’t really have a larger mission like Facebook’s “our mission is helping people understand the world around them” or Google’s: “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. An individual really couldn’t take on that mission, but a community of like-minded, like directed people of passion could. So isn’t business a community?

Thoughts?

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