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“Connections That Count”—Empowering Employees by Nurturing • 129

Employees with kids and families, for instance, might require help with
things like finding schools, religious institutions, cultural opportunities,
and employment opportunities for spouses, whereas a younger set of new
hires may not.

External professional networks

A final kind of network pivotal to a new hire’s success is the external pro-
fessional network. This network contains peers located outside of the work-
place who nonetheless enhance a new hire’s ability to get work done. These
peers could be functionally related to the new hire (e.g., other quality con-
trol managers), members of the same industry, or competitors and business
partners (e.g., suppliers, value adding channel participants, or customers).
All are part of the organization’s and new hire’s business ecosystem, and as
such all can help the new hire get more accomplished with less energy.
Business Ecosystems Managers sometimes underestimate just how
vital an ecosystem can be to achieving goals; a big mistake. Many years
ago, Microsoft had a sales force of only a hundred people, a size clearly
inadequate to achieve the firm’s ambitious goal of getting everybody to
adopt Microsoft’s enterprise software products. Taking stock of the chal-
lenge, Microsoft realized that a number of independent technology busi-
nesses out in the market possessed the knowledge and local relationships
required to sell the firm’s products. So Microsoft embraced a business
model centered on “Value Added Resellers,” educating these members
of its ecosystem and tooling and empowering them to sell Microsoft’s
products on behalf of the company. This created extreme leverage for
Microsoft, enabling performance exponentially higher than what would
have been possible given the investment the company made in its per-
sonnel. This is just one example of development and exploitation of an
ecosystem. Firms also rely on external networks when they get communi-
ties of third-party developers to add enhancements to platforms, or enlist
customers to serve as evangelists for products or even act as product design-
ers themselves. This general theme has been further popularized via atten-
tion to relatively new concepts such as “crowd sourcing.”
Given how vital ecosystems have become, firms must do as much
as possible to help individuals develop external contacts. For a scientist