The last thing I wanted to talk about in terms of enablers, things that really work well, is the social capital issue. I’ve just finished a book on social capital, a subject I learned about, by the way, by doing a lot of work at the World Bank. Social capital can be defined as investments made – investments, that’s why it’s capital – to facilitate cooperative activities in organizations that have a measurable rate of return. 
    So it’s not just mom and apple pie. There’s nothing wrong with mom or apple pie. But it’s investments made when there is an expectation to increase social capital. Now that’s easy to say. But what they hell are they? 
   This is what the World Bank and many other sociologists and political economists are working at. There are about seven or eight books published this year on this, and it’s sort of a   what goes along with infrastructure 

Trust

    So social capital: what are some of the drivers of it when I say it’s an important issue. Trust. Nothing happens if you don’t trust people. Trust is the greatest lubricant for corporate efficiency. It’s even better than information. Why should anyone do anything with anyone else, if they don’t trust them? And if you don’t trust people, what do you do in the absence of trust? In organizations, forget about countries, that’s another talk. With an organization, what do you do when you don’t trust people? You bargain, you negotiate, and you monitor.  Constant monitoring, constant negotiation, constant bargaining. That takes a lot of time and money. And it’s not innovative or useful activities. It’s boring. It’s demeaning. And basically, it’s worthless. 
    I have thirty-two people who report to me. We all travel a lot. I have to approve their expenses. So it’s a lot of money, right? People run up in a year a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t do it, folks. I am very candid. I don’t review it. I just approve the whole damn thing. If someone wants to ruin their career if they think they can get a free airline ticket, do it. Go ahead. 
   The time I save by not monitoring that, I can write a book, I can read a report, I can come to a conference like this, and give a talk like this, to people, or I could learn something. I could meet with people. I could think of a thousand things I’d rather do. I could even take a nap. Whatever I do will be better than doing that. And if people want to game the system, if they think it’s worth my lasting animosity to get a free ticket somewhere, go ahead. But they don’t. I don’t hire people like that. Because I hire people I trust. That’s on a tiny scale. 
   But when you start multiplying this across a large organization, I don’t know what percent it amounts to, but it’s huge. I was meeting with IBM’s Chief Financial Officer. He bemoans the faxt that we used to have 27,000 CPAs working for IBM. Can you imagine: 27,000?  They’d monitor everything. And he was crying, that those were the great days. You know, if he said that we had lost 27,000 programmers, or engineers, that would be a tragedy. And that’s nothing against accountants. You need them when you need them, But trust is really important. Trust  for families and for countries and for companies. 
   Now of course, the big question is what do you do about trust? Now here’s when you get into questions of leadership, of trustworthiness, of transparency, of working in a way that inspires trust. I don’t have time to go through all of this, but there are things one can do. Look in your own lives. This artificial distinction between work and life which I find, just drives me crazy, when people say, “Oh yes, at home, I do this, or in my community, but when I get to work, I’m a different person. Durkheim said that it’s the great source of anomie and suicide. And I think it’s right. I think it drives people crazy. Think about what you do with trust in your life and bring it to work. It just makes life a lot easier. It really does. And you can be more efficient. It’s a big social capital issue.
    Another big social capital issue is the strength and durability of networks and ties. And this is of course eroded by volatility and telecommuting and virtuality. People trust each other when they know each other. Trust is a big function of reciprocal relationships over time. Although you can trust a person on meeting them, the kind of quick trust, the army stuff, that exists, and a lot of people who deal with emergency situations, but generally, you trust a person over time. There are some repeated transactions, and they act in a way that is trustworthy. They do what they say they are going to do. They don’t do what they say that they are not going to do. If you have constant churning of the workforce, for example, the Big Five consulting firms, are up to 40% turnover, you have pure transaction organizations. There is no trust because there are no durable networks, except at the very top. That’s true in a lot of organizations, organizations that like stirring the pot, that like constant turnover. You don’t get durability in networks and you lose social capital. 
    Social capital is strongly dependent on rich durable networks which develop trust, which develop knowledge sharing, develop a sense of reciprocity so that it becomes generalized. Generalized reciprocity. What I mean by that is someone who asked you a question that is going to cost you something in time and effort, but you’re going to answer it, not because you owe that specific person a favor, but because the culture is one of generalized reciprocity. It gets embedded in the norms. That again is worth its weight in platinum. Look at firms that are low generalized reciprocity, versus high. You really see a difference. You can feel it when you walk around the place. And these are things that you can act on, you can work with, by trying to keep these networks in place.
    Now again, there’s a dark side to this. You don’t want cliques. You don’t want groups that exclude others. We’ve seen plenty of that in America. Someone said when I wrote this book on social capital, well, the Klu Klux Klan has very high social capital. You surely don’t approve of that? Well, there’s some truth to that. You can get cliquishness, you can get an exclusion, you can get all sorts of paranoid fantasies, in groups that don’t have input from the outside. There’s a dark side to anything. 
   On the other hand, it’s really worth doing. It’s really worth doing. 
   Trust. 
   Strive for it. 
   Rich dense networks with trust and space and time. And a sense of identity. I mean it isn’t quite as true for you people, though it sure is true in the outside world. You retain people. I have to give this big talk to the consulting firms in December and they think, because they come from business schools, they think it’s all about money. 
   Not true, folks. There’s a ton of research showing that Maslow was right. Past a certain point, it’s not money. People get really pissed off when they see inequalities, and when they’re not treated well. But past a certain point, people don’t work for money. The point is not that high. 
    They don’t work necessarily for money. What do they work for? Recognition. Identity. Feelings about your coworkers really count. And that’s what’s ignored in the workplace so often, including in my own firm, in any large firm. We have forty firms as members of the Institute for Knowledge Management, and all of them are facing these issues. 
    But some really address it. The SAS Institute. UPS. I could name some that are really careful about this. This really matters to us. So we’re not going to move people around too much. We’re not going to go overboard on virtuality, which can be crazy idea. People sometimes say that IBM stands for, “I’m By Myself.” And of course, big companies have to eat their own cooking: they give people a laptop and think that’s the answer to their problems. There are a lot of firms that act like this. It goes against everything we’ve learnt in social science for the last three hundred years, that people need a sense of identity, a sense of “groupness”, a sense of working with other people. We’re made that way. We’re hard-wired that way.