The “Hand-me-up” Generation
I sat at sushi last week with some great friends from the world of web 2.0 and open source; exuberant and brilliant people like Chris and Tara, John and his wonderful wife Malgosia. And, some new ones; Ben, Tantek, Sean, and JP. The conversation proved a fascinating one, filled with thoughts on social software, open source, and even the future of market models.
And I thought to myself, hmm…the future of digital markets. This is being driven by my generation.
We don’t accept the status quo.
We weren’t taught to.
Markets are going to change.
What a fascinating topic. And, fundamentally exactly why I chose Economics as my major back at the University of Colorado.
Then, later that week, JP wrote this blog after he took a look at one of my earlier posts talking about how to manage our generation. And, he is right on the money. The world is evolving so rapidly through technology and the social connections it creates, that many firms and managers can’t keep up. Our generation connects, communicates, and moves about at ridiculously fast speeds.
As we move into the work force, more and more of us will look for the best small teams, the most interesting projects, and open technology and collaboration systems.
From you, boomers, we’ll look for open networks and communication vehicles. We’ll want to communicate as rapidly as we have for our entire lives. In this respect, your closed communication networks just won’t do. We can’t handle not using email, or IM at work. You built those networks for us outside of work, and we grew up on them.
So if they don’t exist inside the walls, we’ll build ways to do it outside of your closed and arbitrary networks (like Facebook). And, this isn’t to say we’re being negative about it, it’s just to say, we want to communicate and do the best work possible in the ways that we were taught to. We’ll build these tools, and hand them up to you. Because, that’s the way you taught us to. That’s what the Web 2.0 movement is about. Open source, open systems, open people, and open work.
How will you begin to think about managing that? A generation that can learn any job, any function, and any piece of technology at an insanely rapid speed. A generation that feels free to communicate openly about themselves and amongst themselves on the largest network in human history.
Now, this is also the reason I’ve started work on a book, and the culmination of much of the work that I have done over the last couple of years in the education sector looking at how students use technology and interact in digital learning environments.
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