After 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.
Blame the people 25 and younger in our midst.
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.
| People under age 30 are better than any previous generation at absorbing information and making decisions quickly. |
A recent tale of bottom-up change initiated from the U.S. military’s front lines is equally intriguing. Troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq were issued “kits” that were less than perfect for their jobs. But with a quick Internet search, soldiers found clothing and equipment much better suited to dusty and intemperate Middle Eastern environments. They began ordering their own gear directly online, ignoring established procedures. Eventually, military brass was won over.
Natives and Immigrants
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.
