The Hashtag, The
Wall Street and
The Wardrobe

By: Kathleen Boatman

As someone who doesn’t use social media that much personally, I’ve been surprisingly excited watching the development of idea exchange platforms in a corporate setting like finance. An article in McKinsey Quarterly discusses how “leaders can realize the vast potential of social technologies to engage employees and transform organizations”. While the main purpose of the social media platform in my company is to create an unrestrained exchange of macro views among investment teams, what’s most fascinating to me is seeing the open and honest nature of conversations regardless of someone’s title or stature. This provides an opportunity to have a voice whether you’re a new hire or a senior executive. Our platform is also set up in such a way that to remain active, you must post every 60 days which seems to have created an environment of engaged participation as opposed to apathetic voyeurism.  Seeing developments like this which attempt to level the playing field for communication within organizations feels to me like peeking into the wardrobe of a Narnian Wall Street.