The People Are the Company

National wants to extend the success of the PLL community across the company. (There are now four recognized CoPs at National, with several more on the horizon.) It has created a CoP Council to provide advice on communities of practice, offer technology support, and lobby for funding for community projects. It has distributed a CoP Toolkit to help rank-and-file technologists build their own communities of practice. It encourages CoPs to create home pages on the World Wide Web to help members communicate with each other -- and to share their work with the rest of the company.

Virtual Social Reality

The challenge for National is the same challenge facing any company that wants to tap the latent power of its emergent communities: How do you achieve scale? CoPs seldom grow beyond 50 members -- that's about as big as they can get before they lose the intense collaborations needed to build shared commitment. But National has sales of nearly $2.5 billion and more than 20,000 people around the world. How can CoPs leverage themselves to affect the fortunes of such a giant organization?

Part of the answer comes from technology -- a fourth principle of competing in the Knowledge Era. New approaches to work require new kinds of computing. The age of desktop computing is giving way to the era of social computing.

Reengineering would not have been possible without new information technologies. Almost without exception, companies applied these technologies to explicit work in the authorized organization; they flattened the formal. New digital technologies will enable companies to engage their employees and energize the emergent.

Consider Project Jupiter, now in operation inside Xerox. Jupiter is "virtual social reality" -- a collection of audio, video, and communications technologies to help communities form and flourish. Jupiter's real value is that it supports interactions that are richer and more focused than free-form electronic discussion groups, bulletin boards -- even the Web. It allows for flexible participation; users can be more or less engaged as they see fit. It provides context as well as content: different programmable "rooms" and "objects" evoke different behaviors. In short, is a network place, rather than an electronic space, where people interact as a community.

We are in the formative stages of this revolution of community. But this much we know: success in the Knowledge Era is as much about the spirit of the enterprise as the economics of the business; as much about the positive energy it unleashes as the positive cash flow it creates. We also know that the most valuable knowledge often resides where we are least able to see or control it: on the front lines, at the periphery, with the renegades. Companies that embrace the emergent can tap the logic of knowledge work and the spirit of community. Those that don't will be left behind.

John Seely Brown (jsb.parc@xerox.com) is vice president and chief scientist of Xerox Corporation. He is director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ("PARC").

Estee Solomon Gray (estee@congruity.com) is the founding partner of Congruity, a consulting firm in Palo Alto, California, and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Learning.