Additional Insight for Myth 6
Managers plan, organize, coordinate, and control
Networks are not Communities
(Adapted from mintzberg.org/blog, 8 October 2015)
If you want to understand the difference between a network and a community, ask your Facebook friends to help paint your house. Networks connect; communities care.
Social media certainly connect us to whoever is on the other end of the line and so extend our social networks in amazing ways. But this can come at the expense of our personal relationships. Many people are so busy texting and tweeting that they barely have time for meeting and reading. Where do they get the meaning? The answer may lie in lost community—both where we live and how we relate in our organizations.
Marshall McLuhan wrote famously about the “global village”, created by new information technologies. But what kind of a village is this? In the traditional village, you chatted with your neighbor at the local market: this was the heart of community. When a neighbor’s barn burned down, you may well have helped to rebuild it. In the global village of today, the most prominent market is the soulless stock market. And when you click on your keyboard, to send a message to some “friend” or associate, this may be a person you have never met. Like those fantasy-ridden love affairs on the Internet, this kind of communicating remains untouched.
Times past, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part.” In contrast, the word has now come to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community”—“people with common interests [but] not common values, history, or memory.”1
Does this matter when we are dealing with the global problems of this world? You bet it does. In his New York Times column, Thomas Friedman reported asking an Egyptian friend about the protest movements in that country: “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate,” he replied. Friedman added that “at their worst, [social media] can become addictive substitutes for real action.”2 That is why, while the larger social movements may raise consciousness about the need for renewal in society, it is the smaller social initiatives, usually developed by small groups in communities, that do much of the renewing.
As for managing in this digital age, effective organizations function as communities of human beings more than collections of human resources. Of course, all organizations need robust networks, to connect their parts and link to the outside world. Networking is a major aspect of their managers jobs. But so too is collaborating, and this requires a strong sense of community in the organization.