The social dependence of independent directors in Europe’s largest companies

You're the product of your environment

As a child, your mother told you to surround yourself with good people. After all, you become the product of your environment and the people you surround yourself with. Companies of all sizes are realizing that they too should hang out with the right crowd - or at least their business functions should.

Humans are social beings, and visible and invisible networks have been around since the beginning of time. Only recently, have businesses started to pay more attention to them and started calling them communities all of a sudden...

Community = Happiness

So these communities, what's all the rage? At the end of the day, it's simple - People just want to be loved. Deep down inside, you want to be loved, you want to be close to people, feel the warmth of other individuals, and share experiences. The happiness in your life is caused by the strength of social relationships in your life. In other words, community makes you happy!

With all these feelings sloshing around communities, it's no wonder companies are utilizing the fuzzy energy to create an emotional bond with their companies. Why pay a PR agency when you can make people feel all fuzzy and cute about your projects?

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Goodbye business functions, enter communities

The best thing about making people feel part of your community is that the sense of belonging can be applied to various business functions. Even though it's still early days, we are seeing communities taking over traditional business functions.

Communities are starting to redefine what traditional business functions will look like. We are moving away from the centralization of business functions under one roof to an amalgamation of various communities serving a similar purpose.

Functions like Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Recruiting will start to become communities. Sales is the most obvious one right now.

A new Sales channel

We are reimagining Sales again...

1990s: Cold Calling

2000s: Email Marketing

2010s: Social Selling

2020s: Community-led sales

Leading the way here is Crossbeam which allows companies to create their proprietary partner ecosystem to share leads and accounts with. The sales team or partnerships managers will connect their existing client data (Salesforce, Hubspot) and will map the accounts that overlap with their community of partners. Together with the partners, the salespeople can then create an outreach strategy.

The beauty here is that everyone involved is better off. Salespeople don't have to spend time finding new clients. Partnerships managers don't have to be on top of communications between channel partners and sales. And partners in the community can receive kickbacks for the introductions. It creates a stronger bond all-around.

HR Reimagined

However, if you really want to learn sales, you'll become a recruiter - it's the toughest school around. You have to first find a CHRO that will give you their vacancies and also source the needed candidates.

What's great is that now you can virtually become a recruiter by activating your community with Pallet. Anyone can curate their own job board and send it to their followers and communities. Companies, however, can upload their jobs and they will receive job boards followed by an already interested community.

The future of Pallet will be exciting as they communitize more of the HR & Recruiting function. Similar to sales, the connection between curators and their followers will increase the likelihood that Pallet's job posting will bring in candidates. If a person you trust hand-picks the jobs for their board & has a relationship with the companies, you are more likely to apply and succeed.

Many will bite the dust

The community pandemic is underway. Traditional business functions will be even more communitized. We mentioned HR & Sales, but there are also other business functions which are being communitized as we speak: Marketing, Product Development, Customer Service & others.

Soon Fortune 500 companies and other corporates will realize that they need to shift their traditional business functions to communities.  What would be the wildest business function to be communitized? Procurement? Accounting? Let's hear your ideas!

Creating happy businesses

In the end, we all want to be part of something, we want to be loved, get close to others, and build strong relationships which make us happy in the long run. A company, with a personality of its own, will become happier because it can build stronger bonds through its various communities.

Communities do not offer a miracle drug, a strategy that makes you invincible in any business environment. The truly important role communities play is in helping existing organizations adapt to rapidly changing market conditions - Albert-László Barabási

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