Do all companies need communities?
There's a conversation happening right now about whether or not all companies can benefit from communities. It's interesting to hear other points of view on the topic, and as much as I think communities are the future for a lot of companies, I don't think they actually would benefit everyone.
I guess if you want to put a really fine point on it, if you call all of the employees of a company a community, then yes, every company has and would benefit from one. I'm thinking of communities of the type I might be paid to manage. I said that there were companies in manufacturing that might not benefit, and someone responded about a community to improve efficiency or safety. And that's true, to a point. If you want to have a Kaizen type process (and you probably should if it's applicable) and your organization is huge, it might make sense. But if you're standing on a line pulling extra bits off of injection molded plastic and that's all you do all day, realistically, a community isn't going to do you much good, or even be something you want to participate in. What is there to discuss?
I was thinking further about jobs I've had - I dispatched tow trucks while I was in college and several years after. The job is pretty straight forward and simple, once you are trained and have been doing it for a year or two, there aren't a lot of surprises. My workplaces were generally very friendly, lively places, and I loved that job. There was a definite community of dispatchers/drivers, but it just happened, and it would be weird to hire somebody to foster that, possibly even off-putting.
So I guess if you want to be really broad and say every company is a community, and every company benefits from that, OK. But I think if we're being pragmatic about it, it doesn't make sense for there to be a person assigned (or hired) to run it.