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Saturday, July 03, 2004Capturing the Value of "Generation Tech" Employees via S+BAfter years of debating the limitations of hierarchically run organizations and the merits of democratization, the end of command-and-control management may finally be here.The new breed of staff can be an enormous force for positive change and success in their companies — if managers listen to them.Unprecedented changes in electronics and communications over the past 30 years have led to fresh patterns of thinking in these young “digital natives” — a new generation of people who are collectively harnessing both new technology and new behavioral skills — often to effect dramatic change within the organizations that employ them.Why do I call these young computer enthusiasts and organizational activists “digital natives”? Think about the extraordinary cumulative digital experiences of each of these future business, military, and government leaders: an average of close to 10,000 hours playing video games; more than 200,000 e-mails and instant messages sent and received; nearly 10,000 hours of talking, playing games, and using data on cell phones; more than 20,000 hours spent watching TV (much of it jump-cut-laden MTV); almost 500,000 commercials seen — all before they finished college. At most, they’ve logged only 5,000 hours of book reading.This generation is better than any before at absorbing information and making decisions quickly, as well as at multitasking and parallel processing. In contrast, people age 30 or older are “digital immigrants” because they can never be as fluent in technology as a native who was born into it. You can see it in the digital immigrants’ “accent” — whether it is printing out e-mails or typing with fingers rather than thumbs. Have you ever noticed that digital natives, unlike digital immigrants, don’t talk about “information overload”? Rather, they crave more information.The youngest workers don’t need to adapt to fit into the agile, flat, team-based organizations older executives are striving to design. They just do it: They communicate, share, buy, sell, exchange, create, meet, collect, coordinate, play games, learn, evolve, search, analyze, report, program, socialize, explore, and even transgress using new digital methods and a new vocabulary most older managers don’t even understand. Blog? Wiki? RTS? Spawn? POS? Astroturf? How do these sound when juxtaposed with cross-functional cooperation, team-based management, and 360 feedback? Unfortunately, many digital immigrant leaders — including many of those who claim to be “plugged in” — don’t get the fact that digital natives bring unique capabilities to large organizations. Often, immigrant managers are caught between their old beliefs and the new realities they observe. As one senior executive put it: “Blogging has proven the vitality of participatory journalism. Now there are people like me coming along and trying to figure out how to package it.” That is simply digital ignorance, say the natives: There’s far more to blogging than the next new product.If consulted, these young employees can be an enormous force for positive change and success in their companies. If ignored, they will doubtless spend their brain cycles on the job plotting (in ways managers can’t control) how to make their own work lives, not their companies, better. | |
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