We shouldn’t treat our young talent like dumb Dilberts.
Question: How can young people transform companies?
Don Tapscott: We have a new generation of young people coming into the work force, into the market place, and in their culture is the new culture of work. At their fingertips they have better tools that exist in some of our most sophisticated corporations.
There’s a real danger that companies will come out of this recession demographically looking like Italy. Now don’t be confused, I love Italy; food, people, wine, culture and so on. But the demographics of Italy, it’s a country with a lot of old people and not a lot of the young people. Japan’s even worst actually. They have old people and restricted immigration policy.
You don’t want to emerge from the recession with a company of old people because you’re in deep trouble. You’ll be unable to make the big changes to your business model and strategy, enabled by the internet, that young people are energizing within our corporations.
Question: How can companies get the best from their young employees?
Don Tapscott: Young people are in the work force, they’re bright eyed, they’re bushy tailed, what do we do? We stick them in a cubicle, supervise them, treat them like Dilbert, and rather than embracing their tools like social networks and blogs and wikis and jams and so on, we ban them. We do the opposite of what we should doing.
Banning Facebook is a totally dysfunctional thing to do. If employees are wasting their time on Facebook, that’s an opportunity to talk about real issues.
One youngster from my book, “Grown Up Digital”, I asked him, 27 years old, works for federal US agency, what was the effect of banning facebook? And he said it was a single most demoralizing thing the management has ever done. It said, we don’t understand your tools, we don’t understand you, we don’t get collaboration and we don’t trust you.
Take a page from Best Buy. The CEO, Brad Anderson, says, my job is not just to make decision, it’s to create the conditions whereby people can self organize to create value. He says the most important people in this company are the blue shirts, the young people working on the stores, tens and thousands of them. They’re closest to our customer, most like by our customer, and in their culture the 21st century Best Buy. And between them and me are layers and layers of management trying to prevent them from changing the company.
He says my job is to give them a license to self-organize. So to your point, they self organize. 25,000 of them created a social network called Blue Shirt Nation. They feel engaged, they collaborate, they talk about things, they share problems. Rather than a sort of command-control hierarchy, they have a networked organization where people used these powerful new tools for collaboration, to have a sense of ownership in the company, and that’s even more important in tough times like this.
Recorded on: June 9th, 2009.
