A sense of community matters, from the playground to the workplace

TWO WEEKS ago, in a small church hall in north London, my three-year-old son picked up his Transformers lunchbox, said goodbye to a few of his friends and gave an end-of-term cuddle to the women who work at the nursery he attends four mornings a week. It was the end of term and summer holidays beckoned.

Our nursery isn’t especially fancy. The hall is a little worse for wear. The toys are not particularly new. Unlike some of the other nurseries in the neighbourhood, it doesn’t do organic food, it doesn’t have guinea pigs for the children to take care of or a vegetable patch where they can grow carrots.

Come to think of it, it doesn’t have much outdoor space at all. Occasionally, the children go to the playground in a rather grim council estate nearby and I have persuaded myself that the bratty kids who once pelted me with water-filled balloons from the same playground have moved to another town.

Yet despite all of this, my son loves the nursery, my wife and I do and so do all of the other parents and kids. Why? The main reason, it seems to me, is the owner and founder, who runs it with an assured calm that speaks to her long-standing experience, her understanding of the market and her ability to make the most of her small business by trying to create a community between us and the staff. She sets the tone.

I often wonder what would happen if the founder was no longer in charge. Would the nursery and the little community that make it work fall apart? Organisations are often distilled into the personality of an individual. Indeed, an entire business literature exists around the idea that a company’s identity is defined by the person at the top.

In recent months, concerns over the health of Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, have highlighted the complicated relationship between leaders and communities. Jobs co-founded the company in 1976 and helped establish it as a technology pioneer. In 1985, however, he resigned after losing a power struggle and while he was away, Apple foundered.

Jobs, meanwhile, flourished. He created a software business and bought an animation film company that he would turn into Pixar, the hugely successful studio behind Toy Story. In 1996, in a bid to revitalise itself, Apple brought him back. It worked.

The company is once again a leading innovator and trendsetter, on the back of products such as the iMac, iPod and iPhone.

Towards the end of last year, however, Jobs appeared gaunt and in January, he announced to employees that he would be going on medical leave until the end of June.

Some shareholders and analysts argued that he and the company had an obligation to publicly disclose the nature of his condition. Apple has not officially done so but, in late June, Jobs returned to work and a hospital in Tennessee confirmed that he had undergone a liver transplant.

Beyond the fascinating narrative of corporate revival and the leadership of Jobs, the reason that this became such a big story has a lot to do with a similar sense of community that marks out my son’s nursery.

The renewed success of Apple has not just been down to management or even creating new products with funky colours and cool designs. It is also because many of its most devoted customers think of themselves as more than mere consumers. They are citizens of a kind of Apple nation, whose loyalty to the brand is about more than owning the best gadgets; it is about being part of a tribe and spreading the word.

These are the people who form the queues outside Macworld, the annual trade fair that until this year was the event where Apple unveiled its latest products, usually via a speech by Jobs wearing his trademark black polo neck shirt and blue jeans.

The event was a gathering for Apple devotees and he has been a symbol of the community. For many of its members – and some others looking in from the outside – the question was whether it could sustain itself without its established leader.

No one is irreplaceable and Tim Cook, the company’s chief operating officer, is considered to have ably steered the ship during Jobs’s absence. It suggests that the company is better placed than it was when he left the first time. The truth is, one doesn’t really know how a company will cope with management change until it happens.

Of course, in the age of social networking the nature of how communities are formed is changing, too. Last week, we published an article on crowdfunding, a form of financing based on raising small stakes from a large group of investors, particularly through online communities. Not only would the process raise funds, one of its proponents said, it would allow his company to harness the “collective intelligence” of the investors.

As Apple and my son’s nursery suggest, engaging more members may complicate matters, but given how easy it is for a business to become over-identified with the personality of its visionary-in-chief, there is perhaps little harm in opening the gates. The bigger the tribe, the deeper the pool of potential chiefs. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)

Lucy Kellaway is on holiday