Workforce Innovations 4.0

I'm now in New Orleans attending my fourth Workforce Innovations conference. The technological wave everyone's been warning about - how technology will revolutionize the way we do business and, really, the way we do everything in our lives - has prevailed and the conference organizers have made serious high-tech strides. Take this blog I'm writing, and the social networking opportunities, and...so many aspects of this conference. The culmination naturally led to yesterday's featured speaker, Don Tapscott, who's authored a number of books about the advent of technology in business strategy and how the children of baby boomers, who have grown up using technology, are revolutionizing the workplace.

I was riveted by his presentation, "Web 2.0", and frankly relieved to hear good news about today's youth. In my work I've seen considerable data that youth lack professionalism in the workplace, have a sense of entitlement, don't have the applied skills that business leaders need, and are unprepared to enter the workforce. So, Tapscott's viewpoint was a nice change. Tapscott's premise is that today's tech-savvy youth are for the first time teaching the older generation how to do things, in effect turning on its head the long-held view that children listen and elders impart knowledge. He asked the crowd who in our families fix our computers? Who knows how to program the Tivo/vcr/insert technology here? Answer: our children. And, through his presentation, he showed how the ease with which the "Net Generation" uses technology can ultimately translate into a revolutionary approach for solving complicated world problems.

Tapscott identified key norms of this generation - freedom, customization, scrutiny, integrity, collaboration, entertainment, speed, and innovation - and explained how these characteristics can help improve today's world. To sum up, today's youth demands freedom while at the same time requiring products they can customize, becoming "prosumers" - consumers that produce customized, innovative products, a la You Tube, Wikipedia, and Facebook. While these technologies started as entertainment outlets, business is already beginning to harness these innovations to develop revolutionary and new business strategies - in Tapscott's words, social networking is becoming social production.

Today's young people have a high degree of integrity, but demand a workplace that's entertaining and are impatient if things take too long to develop. Young people want work that's fulfilling, and that allows them to continually learn new skills and information. Their ability to multitask to find information and insistence on collaborating through open source solutions can provide the catalyst needed to develop solutions to intractable problems. As a result, a new model of democracy centered around civic engagement enabled by technology is emerging.

As a Gen Xer with a reasonable knowledge of technology, I definitely felt behind the IT curve after Tapscott's presentation. But, I am blogging...and I'm ready to collaborate and solve problems through IT with like-minded people I never would have been able to meet in the old world, the world without technology.