A reflection inspired by an article in the french newspaper “Le Figaro”…

I think you’r familiar with the concept of exented company. In simply supposes that a company is not only an entity by itself but makes up a whole with its surrounding. As an example it brings a company to cooperate more with its custumers or its suppliers in order to embetter its products, stick to the market, be more reactive, anticipate… and at the end be more efficient and increase its profitability.

I’d qualifiy this side of the extended company as a “spatial side”. The article was about the importance of alumni’s network for companies and made me realize there was another dimension we often forget: the temporal side.

As a matter of fact we all know that making a company behave as a community is a guarantee of performance. We also know how networks are important to make opportunities happen. What we neglect so often is the importance of the community of people who are not in the company anymore but who are still important for it.

Perharps they may come back for a new challenge, they know people the company can hire (so it lowers recruitments costs), their experience is still valuable, they can become customers or suppliers…

When we consider a company we should integrate those people in the human capital component because they still are ressources, not the way they were before, but they still are. And when we talk about the network of the extended company we should not only consider the spatial dimension but also the temporal one, taking in account what the “ex” can give.