In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work [Hardcover]

Don Cohen (Author), Laurence Prusak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Knowledge has always resided in organizations - but it wasn't until the Information Age put a premium on ideas that intellectual capital was recognized as a critical resource. Now, forces like technology, globalization, and the rise of free agency and virtual workplaces are bringing another form of 'hidden' capital to the forefront. "In Good Company" is the first book to examine the role that social capital - a company's 'stock' of human connections such as trust, personal networks, and a sense of community - plays in thriving organizations. Written by leading knowledge management experts Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, this groundbreaking book argues that social capital is so integral to business life that without it, cooperative action - and consequently productive work - isn't possible. The authors help today's leaders understand the nature and value of social capital, suggest ways they can encourage and enhance it, and explore how they can protect this vital but increasingly vulnerable resource in a volatile, virtual world. Drawing on major social and economic theories, and the experiences of organizations including the World Bank, Aventis Pharma, Alcoa, Russell Reynolds, and UPS, "In Good Company" identifies the social elements that contribute to knowledge sharing, innovation, and high productivity. The authors convincingly show how almost every managerial decision-from hiring, firing, and promotion to implementing new technologies to designing office space - is an opportunity for social capital investment or loss. They also reveal the benefits that derive from investments in social capital, such as greater commitment and cooperation, increased talent retention, and more intelligent responses to customer needs. A landmark book on the critical role that relationships play in organizational success, "In Good Company" helps employees at all levels recognize the power of social capital to help people work better, and make organizations better places to work. Don Cohen is a writer, consultant, and the editor of "Knowledge Directions". Laurence Prusak is Executive Director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management and co-author of "Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know".

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Relationships between supervisor and worker are important, but so are the relationships between other kinds of colleagues. For example, UPS workers frequently get together on a lunch break, not simply to eat but to exchange information or to divide up the workload more fairly. Prusak (executive director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management) and Cohen (editor of Knowledge Directions) provide insight into the causality between a company's social atmosphere and its success.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The book's novelty and appeal lie in the . . . attention to the power of commonplace conversations. . ." -- New York Times, February 25, 2001

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087584913X
• ISBN-13: 978-0875849133
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #595,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The unseen role of social capital in organizations revealed!, February 7, 2001

By 

"learningguy" (Arlington, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Hardcover)

Larry Prusak and Don Cohen do a wonderful job in their book, In Good Company, of helping organizational leaders understand the social capital phenomenon in all of its exquisite messiness. This is an excellent work for anyone who cares about the quality of organizational life and the ability to do great things at work. Larry and Don do an outstanding job of showing how a number of important firms, including UPS, 3M and HP, take the matter of social capital very seriously and make investments in building and nurturing it.

I would suggest this book as a bit of "contrarian" reading for KM emthusiasts, thinkers and practitioners who favor a more technocentric approach. In Good Company digs into the profoundly social aspects of work, knowledge sharing and learning and offers a heavy dose of reality in its discussion of "the challenge of virtuality." After reading In Good Company, my hope is that it will help all of us build our understanding of what individual, collective and organizational success truly looks like and requires of us in these extraordinary times!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Common sense, uncommon insight, April 30, 2001

By 

Quotidian "quotidian" (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Hardcover)

If I could inflict one book on business executives this year, this would be it. In arguing that social capital within organisations has a value, and that there are ways to encourage it, the authors will not surprise most corporate infantry. But they draw together the human strands of this topic - trust, networking, the office environment, gossip - in an elegant and compelling way, and turn an insightful lens towards everyday facets of employee interaction. While the approach is scholarly, there's enough case study and anecdote to give their case a grounded authenticity. It's extremely well written, and the ideas it brings together beg for enlargement and further research.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I was glad someone noticed!, June 18, 2002

By 

Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Hardcover)

This is a good and helpful read. While Cohen and Prusak do tend to say a lot of things that one has a gut feeling of but has never read or heard someone say aloud about working relationships, some of it was really fascinating. They have a particularly interesting chapter on chat and storytelling and the functions those activities serve at work. The theme of the book is that organizations should invest in social capital the way they invest in other kinds of capital, but that such investments can't be faked. Workers know when the love is real, so to speak.

The writers address particularly cogent trends of telecommuting and volatile industries and how those can cause stress in organizations because they lower social capital. They had some interesting points. One thing I particularly responded to was the chapter on trust. They wrote that when someone says their organization is particularly political, what they are saying is
that there is very low trust. Another thing they wrote that really interested me is that the virtual office isn't going to succeed - and hasn't as predicted - because work is an inherently social activity. That's one of the reasons people like it and are dedicated to it. Not that many people are ever going to want to work at home in their pajamas - every single day. They also suggest that money isn't the only effective lure for new talent or retainer of current employees. They write that if talent can just be bought, it will be, but if you create high social capital in your organizations, money alone won't be able to suck the talented people from your offices.

[The book made me want to read more by Chris Argyris, who is an organizational pyschologist at Harvard, and the book "The Social Life of Information."]