The Growing Importance of Community and Relationship Capital

Two of my recent Tweets @maryadamsica told stories about the growing importance of relationship capital:

What is Buddhist Economics – Showed the incredible difference in the growth of Business Week’s print edition versus their BW Exchange, where  readers choose the topics.

Amazon’s AWS Strategy Becomes Clearer Every Day - Suggesting that  Amazon’s web services business is beating out big players like IBM, Microsoft and Google because, among other reasons, they have “the best developer relations attitude and execution in the business.”

When I talk to folks about relationship capital–which together with human and structural capital forms intellectual capital–they nod. But I’m not sure that it always sinks in. Relationship capital has always been important. But the quality of your relationships, and not just with customers, is becoming a more and more important factor in the success of organizations.

In these two examples, relationship capital is turning out to be a key driver of the business models. It’s not what you sell. It’s about who is in your community and why they stay. Ultimately that relationship capital is what holds everything else together.