Category Archives: Don Tapscott

The Perfect Storm – #3

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Don Tapscott has always been interested in the young. In Growing Up Digital, he initially thought, like Garrison Keillor, that all his own kids were above average technologically, – until he realized that their friends also seemed to be geniuses too. Now he is more focused on what this new generation will bring to the workplace, – and it is a very different style of participation that will at first cause conflicts with the existing workforce. The old style was not about sharing, collaborating, socializing or creating. The new one is.

In reading and reflecting on Wikinomics, I can’t help thinking that we are seeing a sea change that could affect the balance that Ned Herrmann saw in the HBDI. In every group of 100 people, he found, there is a good balance between those who favour, fact, function, feeling and future – and he named these quadrants A, B, C, and D. The new generation appears to be showing a shift to those characteristics that Herrmann attributed to preferences characterized by the right side of the brain. The old business environment would hardly be characterized as social. The new one, by the sheer force of numbers in this cohort, will be.

So here is a simple map to evaluate where your work force stands now. These are the key words valued by the young. Does your organization encourage these attributes or squelsh them? The answer may well relate to your future.

And if you want to know more about the HBDI, there is a free chapter for download this week here.

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

The Perfect Storm -#2

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While I’ve skimmed the entire text of Wikinomics, I’m still focused on some of the ideas and insights of Chapter 2 – and have had a good time surfing some of the sites that Don Tapscott assumes that we should know about. There is now no excuse to avoid self-development because the opportunities for ordinary people to learn something new are tremendous. And the ability to link with others and how this linkage will change the world is the main thesis of this important book.

Here are some statistics about the Blogosphere – there are now 50 million of them, 1.5 million posts daily – and this is one of them – and a new one created every second. Sound like way too much information? The beauty is that it has never been possible to know all we need to know – and we can now humbly accept this – and focus on what we really do need and want to know.

Goals are an interesting area – you can see a previous post here about New Year’s Resolutions, created at a time when most of us tune in to them. One of the more interesting social sites is one created by the man who brought personalization to the Amazon site. You have probably logged on to find some suggested things to buy, based on your previous choices. Josh Peterson took what early website creators knew – and I actually had a site in the early 1990’s before my software testing son did – that the way to help people find your site was to insert metatags – now simply called Tags. Metatags are data about data. So if you are interested in Business Creativity, you Google that. When the International Hotel and Restaurant Association based in Paris was looking for a conference speaker, a 20 something researcher typed that in, and the end result was an all expense trip to South Africa for me. Not a bad result for typing two words into the .html.

Peterson decided that it would be interesting to bring people together to talk about their common goals. He calls the site 43 things. The idea is wonderful. But the top daily and all time goals?? I can’t resist mapping them to show you them here! To a geeky grandmother some seem so attainable that one wonders why they are on the list at all. Some are probably unattainable (See the Happiness Hypothesis previous post) Some are still around- procrastination, for example, is common to all of us. The point of the site is that people can share their goals in a massive way – and this collective sharing is part of a new culture that for good or ill is now with us. Let’s hope that such a community helps its members to discern what goals will really contribute to a fulfilling and meaningful life for them both as individuals and for the planet we inhabit.

Try your own goals – and share them on 43 Things or here if you like. And if you want to know about VisiMap, the program that I created this diagram with, visit my store, which this week features a free eBook on getting started with the software.
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

The Perfect Storm – 1

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Wikinomics summarizes astutely so many things that are happening that I’ll probably continue with it for several posts. The second chapter sounds like a video of my own life.

This week my youngest son invited me to come on to Geni to help create the family history. He’s managed to put in his wife, son and brothers and his parents without any difficulty but needed some help with the previous generation – he’s taking care of the future ones admirably. So I accepted the invitation and immediately became part of a social network of the kind that Don Tapscott talked about earlier in the week. I can now invite any other known relative to pitch in and increase the information and connections.

I’m hooked into the technology revolution and global economics – did I ever dream of selling software to someone in Melanesia even a few years ago – but I’m definitely not part of the demographic that is driving the new world. Grandmothers have a chance to join it though. The convergence of these three is what Tapscott means by the perfect storm.

For many, the early vision of the Web was a library, – a place where there was knowledge to be passively received. Those of us who had to do research projects certainly found that it speeded things up. Even in the early ‘90’s we were on Compuserve’s Creativity Forum sharing ideas. We probably aggregated information and shared it with a client or two. But we didn’t think of re-writing other people’s posts or adding to them.

But that’s the new Web. Tapscott terms this social glue. The Net Generation that he first observed in his own family and thought the kids were geniuses, is taking over. Their genius is the norm. The lastest generation think that technology is just a part of life and go beyond their predecessors who thought it was so cool to text message on their Palm Pilots. The Net-Geners are taking collaboration into every part of their working and educational lives and they are connecting globally.

The results are here. Information is no longer something just to receive. It’s something to improve, share, create, and participate in. And the interaction is huge. It goes way beyond families cooperatively writing their history and is reaching into the biggest companies and institutions. That’s bound to have some implications for the rest of us.

So how are you faring? How is your life changing in the middle of this Tsunami of interaction? Interact! You can comment below!