It can be done – you can find examples to support the idea that better connections between employees improve the financial position of the company. Rob Cross is a University of Virginia professor who’s made a career out of it judging from the volume of work he’s published about the financial returns of networks and related topics. My favorite story from Dr. Cross’s work has to do with one company that saved $200,000 in one day when an infrastructure architect learned through network chatter that a critical software program was not working and made the critical suggestion for how to fix it -- the fix no one else had thought of -- one day before the company invested $200,000 in the wrong solution