The Importance of Community

In our socially fragmented age, where some people prefer to spend time inside what often amount to online echo chambers, I’ve been wondering what’s happened to our sense of community. In my experience, the best communities create connection and inclusiveness. They encourage mutual respect, valuing, and trust. And they go out of their way to welcome a diversity of people to infuse fresh thinking and retain the community’s vitality and relevance.

Bringing us together or keeping us apart

I’ve been thinking about the importance of community for organizations, and especially for businesses, in an era in which powerful digital technologies can bring us together as well as keep us apart. The sense of responsibility to others that communities establish was captured well by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who said: “Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.”

Staying relevant through empathy

At our company, we’ve come to define community along two dimensions. The first is our belief in building strong, intimate relationships with a small number of clients. That way we’re able to focus all of our knowledge, capabilities, and effort on being deeply and continuously relevant to each client. We’ve found that the best way to be relevant to clients is to get to know them as people, keep attuned to their ever-evolving needs, and invest continuously in the knowledge and skills of our 260,000 associates who work to solve their toughest problems. Like any great community, we—our clients and associates—serve as engines of change for one another.  

Performing with purpose

The second dimension of community for us is our belief in performing with purpose. We’re so interdependent with the larger world that, to echo Bertrand Russell, we realize our sustained success depends on the prosperity and progress of others. Given our efforts to envision and build the digital economy, how can we best contribute to the world? 

One meaningful way is to strive to make the digital economy work for everyone. Today, unfortunately, it does not. A significant percentage of the working population in many countries does not have the science, technology, engineering, and math (or STEM) education and skills to thrive in this digital era. With each passing day we see how the growing inequality between the most- and least-skilled members of society is roiling politics and policies.

Closing the technology skills gap

So our company is working to help close the growing technology skills gap arising from rapid and relentless advances in technology. This, of course, is a long-term endeavor—and one that many in the tech community are involved with, as evidenced by the World Economic Forum’s “Closing the Skills Gap” initiative, which aims to provide skills to 10 million people by 2020. Along with participating in this initiative, our global efforts in STEM education go back more than a decade.

Forming the Cognizant U.S. Foundation

Most recently, we announced the formation of Cognizant U.S. Foundation, which will support STEM and digital education and skills training for U.S. workers and students. We’re establishing this 501(c) (3) non-profit with an initial grant of $100 million.

We believe that some of the world’s most difficult challenges can be overcome by a mixture of communities and technology. Communities excel at pursuing collective ideals and at picking the right problems to solve and then pooling their know-how to find effective solutions. And technology enables their work to scale across geographies and sectors of the society. We’re determined to apply the talent of our extended global community and our mastery of technology to tackle planet-scale problems.