It takes a beehive

Dan Schawbel talks to Seth Kahan about building communities, which Kahan describes as beehives. [Link] The conversation includes a point David Armistead and I have been talking about quite a bit:

Do you think a company will survive the next decade without establishing a beehive?

Successful companies today require a social component to succeed. In the early stages a company may be able to get by with only command-and-control running operations. But, as soon as success starts to take place, knowledge sharing - which operates outside the traditional hierarchical org chart - becomes critical. Companies that prefer to isolate their members by keeping their noses to the grindstone, focused only on their work program lose valuable competitive advantage. I don’t know of a company today that can operate that way and succeed.