Interesting to note that the big consultancies and media organisations like the BBC have gone for the former (the PWCs of this world would of course claim that such a choice is part of their corporate culture anyway).

The second way informal social networks are being forced upon them via social media is simply down to graduate recruitment - the intake of this year will be a little tougher to socialise if their accustomed means are abruptly disconnected (look at number of Deloitte or PWC intern Facebook groups for example).

More formally, I can’t help but chuck in the issue of gender and how this fits in and around all this…

The big problem with this networking approach is that if you are new to the organization, you’re an unknown; people don’t know you and you don’t know them. Few want to take a chance with an unknown on an account worth millions of dollars. You have to market yourself across not only the consulting organization but also the sales organization. It’s a daunting task to say the least and it takes time, which is one thing most companies are loathe to provide.

How does technology address this? The simple answer is it doesn’t. It can enable and facilitate communication and network interaction - if implemented and rolled out properly - but it doesn’t make it happen.

A company must create and establish a culture - and everything that necessarily includes and implies - that supports nodes, meaning people AND their knowledge, assimilating into networks. IGS tried to accomplish this in a couple of ways. First, it implemented (very poorly) a mentor program. Unfortunately, like so many companies, it was so much lip service because mentors in the consulting profession had the same pressure - actually more - to generate revenue PLUS there was no reward, and thus no incentive, for mentoring. That was Big Company Mistake #1.

Big Company Mistake #2: IGS used collaborative tools like Lotus Notes and mainframe databases for knowledge management and e-mails and IM for communication. There’s nothing to wrong with e-mail and IM but updating central knowledge repositories placed a huge burden on consultants (those on engagements) who were already working 50+ hour weeks.

Big Company Mistake #3: Although Global Services was supposed to be collaborative, in truth is was extremely competitive and discouraged collaboration. If a consultant asked for feedback on a presentation or approach from a manager, it was viewed as a sign of insecurity and/or incompetence. Additionally, consultants would modify their team’s presentations if it meant putting them in good graces with principals (without a principal’s support, a consultant doesn’t work), despite possibly diluting or changing the team’s message to the client.

This may have been a bit rambling, but I do have a point - that if a company’s culture does not truly support networking and collaboration, no amount or type of technology thrown at the issue will make a positive difference.

As productivity increases, larger and larger organizations are possible because the marginal inefficiency of an added employee is lower.

However, the corporation is still essentially feudal, and so we see the same kinds of forces at work that swept away monarchies and replaced them with nation-states (many of them essentially dictatorships).

The rise of franchises for example can be traced to radically lowered transportation and broadcast communication costs compared to bottom-up and lateral communication (for coordination). Now the pendulum is swinging the other way.

But it remains to be seen whether we’ll eventually get any democratically elected CEOs.