If you’ve seen any presentations in the last 5 years talking about the multiple generations composing today’s workforce, chances are that you’ve already seen the following table, or one of its multiple variations, all somehow influenced by the book "When Generations Collide: Who They Are. Why They Clash. How to Solve the Generational Puzzle at Work", by Lancaster and Stillman:

If you are wondering where you fall in this division, here are the boundaries:

• Traditionalists, born between 1900 and 1945;
• Baby Boomers, born 1946 to 1964;
• Gen-Xers, 1965-1980;
• Millennials, or NetGens, born after 1980

I liked the way the table above summarized the generational differences the first time I saw it, to the point I asked a colleague to re-use it in my current engagement. But when I proposed to add this table to the material I’m developing - part of a collaboration strategy for a very large government agency - I had an enlightening conversation with the folks I’m working with, both of them boomers and brilliant.

I don’t buy this. When I was 18, I was very much like the NetGen described in this table. The behaviours described here have a lot to do with personal traits and lifecycle. Today’s NetGens, once they get married, start a family and get a mortgage, may become more settled and act pretty much like a boomer. Besides, there are young folks today that are uncomfortable with change, thrive under hierarchical structures and prefer things to be run the "conventional" way.

Disclaimer: The above is my recollection of what 2 people said, which can be very different from what they actually said, so take it with a grain of salt.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m inclined now to think that the table above is VERY ageist, and it’s not helping us to actually understand the differences between people.

Our brain likes generalizations. It helps us to create a simple model of how life works and simplifies our decision making. But generalizations are typically based on perceived averages. And there is no such a thing as the average person, the average Asian, or the average woman. You probably have seen one of the multiple incarnations of "if the world were a village of 100 people" (see here & here for more details). The hypothetical average human being would be Asian, adult, heterosexual, Christian, always hungry and with no TV at home. I would bet that the vast majority of the human population does not fit that full profile, even though those are the dominant attributes in each category. Those attributes are independent variables, they don’t come in bundles.

There’s a Brazilian song that says something along the lines of "looking from a close range, nobody is normal" ("de perto ninguém é normal", Vaca Profana, Caetano Veloso, if you need to know). That’s so much true! Just imagine the table above trying to do the same with gender, race, or sexual preferences. You would probably think that to be very inappropriate or stereotypical. One of the things that make humanity fascinating is exactly how complex and different we are. Nobody is "one in a million". There was never a person like you, and there will never be. We are all truly unique, each one of us a long tail of our own. So please don’t tell me that you are too old to blog or that you "get" technology just because you are supposed to be a NetGen. There’s nothing like living in exponential times: the only thing you are supposed to be is yourself.

The thing to remember here is that a wiki starts with a lack of structure so that its users can define the structure that best serves their needs. That’s what makes it so successful. People don’t have to learn a new structure, and fit their work into that structure, which is automatically limiting. Instead, they can focus on their work, and build a structure as they go - one that evolves with their information and doesn’t get in the way!

- Stewart Mader, “The nine-letter word that determines wiki success”, Wikipatterns blog

A few weeks ago, I would have agreed whole-heartedly with Stewart Mader, whose Wikipatterns site and book have taught me a lot about wiki adoption. But working on getting a wiki off the ground has made me wonder if I need to learn more about information architecture in this Web 2.0 world. I want to make it easy for people to browse through resources and contribute their own. As a wiki gardener, I’m not trying to make the wiki follow the clean, formal lines of an English garden, but I do want to encourage it to grow and make sure the good parts get enough exposure.

I’m building scaffolds and seeding the wiki with content, but I’m still figuring out how to balance making the wiki useful and making it rough enough to invite participation. I’ve started reading about information design and information architecture, but the hyperlinked, organic nature of wikis makes it an interesting challenge. When is it better to break things up into lots of small, addressable bits, and when is it better to combine pages so that someone can edit everything at the same time? How do you balance people’s desires for sophisticated interfaces with the ease of modification of simple markup? How do you create enough structure to make it easy for people to navigate, but not so much structure that people feel restricted?

Here’s how I’m dealing with those challenges:

• Focus on getting lots of content into the wiki. Comfortable page length will depend on whether your wiki engine supports section editing. If you can’t edit sections, break pages apart into sections that you can edit easily. Don’t think too much about the level of detail, though, as you can always refactor pages. I started with pages of about 500 words, and then I combined or separated chunks as I needed them.
• Optimize for input. Make it easy for casual wiki readers to add to the content. Whether that’s an inbox page that they can add to if they don’t know where else to put things, section editors so that they can quickly find the part they want to update, or an e-mail address they can send wiki content to, help people just get the information into the wiki.
• Build multiple paths through the content. People can come to a wiki page from anywhere, so provide plenty of links to related content and context. Create pages for navigation, too.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the topic!

A question I hear often when speaking about Social Networking and Web 2.0 is: if everybody else is doing it, is playing "me-too" the only thing left for me to do? That is a fair question, and in fact, many times embracing Web 2.0 superficially will only allow you to be at par with your competitors. However, when you grasp the notion that Web 2.0 is an approach, not a technology, you can do much better than that.

First of all, even though early entrants do benefit from garnering mindshare as innovative and bold, there are several cases of late entrants who were able to level the competition by offering a superior service. Both Google over Yahoo search and Facebook over MySpace come to mind, but there are several other notable examples.

So let’s suppose you’ve been late to the 2.0 game but now wants to try it out. What can you do to get an edge over your competitors? In other words, how can you obtain, in MBA lingo, a Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA)? A SCA happens when a firm "has value-creating processes and positions that cannot be duplicated or imitated by other firms that lead to the production of above normal rents" (Wikipedia). If you read the whole article (which is not that well written, by the way), you’ll find that, to be sustainable, your advantage has to be distinctive and proprietary.

Knowing that, three of your resources come to mind:

1. Your people (employees, business partners and customers)
2. Your data
3. Your products and services

People is the most overlooked of the three. Most companies claim things along the lines of "our customer always comes first", "our people is our most valuable asset" and "you can trust the excellence of our business partners". Talk is that cheap. Very few act on it.

Your employees

The executives in your company, individually speaking, may be among the brightest business people in the world. They’ve been through it all, seen it all, have powerful incentives to make your company do really well. But nobody really knows your business as much as the collective intelligence of all your employees. The teller in that remote city in Wisconsin knows that you just lost a loyal customer because you started charging too much for a cheque book, or because your company was rumoured to be exposed to a serious security breach. Your fast-food cashier knows that charging 50 cents for having a small salad instead of fries in your combo made 3 clients cancel their orders this week. That information can be trivial and inconsequent. Those employees may not even think about those things that much. If we want to be fancy, we can call all that tacit knowledge, which is typically deemed as hard to access. So, why bother?

Well, Web 2.0 is changing that. Knowledge that was only registered in people’s minds or oral conversations are increasingly becoming digitalized in blog posts, tweets, comments, text messages, VoIP conversations, call centre recordings, YouTube videos, you name it. Now, if the only channel your employees have to express themselves is the corporate email and the conversation at the cafeteria, you’re missing all that. The chart below shows that email and other traditional communication tools fall short in both reach and breadth of content. Using blogs, wikis and enterprise social networking tools can really amplify and strengthen the networks you develop at work, and will capture a fair amount of tacit knowledge that would otherwise be lost. You’ll also be able to reach out to the "invisible majority", people that you should care about and never have a chance to listen to (represented in white in the diagram below).

Many companies are afraid of giving employees an internal corporate blogging platform because that could be used as a space to vent frustration and rant about all sorts of things. Don’t be afraid. Rest assured that both venting and ranting WILL happen. And that’s a good thing for you, as you do want to learn what the major causes of dissatisfaction may be. Well, unless mistreating your employees IS part of your business model. But over time you’ll see that people complaining is not going to be the major theme there. Some folks will tell stories, others will share their knowledge or come up with new ideas. As the community matures, that may be even an added incentive for your employees to stick with your company, as the sense of belonging tends to be strengthened during this process.

Guidelines

Make sure you establish reasonable guidelines for what is OK, and revisit the guidelines from time to time to ensure they stay current and relevant. Also, don’t enforce guidelines as if you were the police. Do it as if you were a parent. People will occasionally post content that will challenge some of the guidelines. Unless it’s blatantly inappropriate, you may be better off leaving it there for a while, for the community to make a judgement. Sometimes breaking a guideline says more about the guideline than about the violator, and guidelines are supposed to evolve with the maturity of the blogging community.

Business partners

Some companies are also creating communities with their business partners, field agents or prosumers. Even though these folks are not part of your payroll, they want you to succeed, and listening to what they have to say can give you a perspective you cannot get from inside. More companies should be doing this in the next few years, opening their collaboration environment to trusted partners.

Customers

Finally, the scariest space of them all: let your customers say, in a public forum, what they think about you, your products and services. You actually should beg for people to comment on those. The more people do it, the less skewed your sample will be. Again, don’t be scared to give up control here. You’ve lost that years ago. If you are a large company or have a best seller product or service, try this simple test. Google your company’s name, and look for related Wikipedia or blog entries. You probably don’t need to go beyond the second page of results to find people speaking about you already. If you are really large, chances are that you’ll even find a <your-company-name>Sucks.com website.

So the bad news is that  the genie is out of the bottle already, you can’t control what people say anymore. The good news is that your competitor’s genie is also out there, so it’s a fair playing field for those who understand the game. I highly recommend you visit Mike Moran’s website for more on that (full disclosure: like me, he also works for IBM).

Done in the right way, this is a very hard capability for others to copy, as your people are truly unique and their contributions cannot be easily replicated.

Stay tuned as I’ll be addressing the other two resources - data and products + services - in a future post.

Chris Brogan blogs on topics relevant to Web 2.0 over at : [chrisbrogan.com].

In his latest blog posting, he is talking about how to introduce social media into your organization. Does this quote apply to you?

‘Companies are being pressured into the whole social media thing from lots of angles. They’re reading about it in mainstream press more often. Their PR agencies are asking them about it. Hell, PR agencies themselves are being pressured into getting into social media and social networking. But what does it mean? Where should one start?’

If this sounds like you, consider reading the series of postings he is coming out, including the first one on why you should

‘Separate Software from Motivations and Process’

You can find the blog post here: Five Starter Moves for Introducing Social Media Into Your Organization

Instead of restricting access to Facebook, Serena Software is embracing it. How? And Why? From Bill Ives blog posting:

Serena is really replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall. Here are the reasons why and what they have seen so far. …the firm is just over 800 employees but is still globally based (operations in 18 countries) with 35% of their employees working virtually.

They are going through a major transition as they move from more traditional enterprise applications to web 2.0 mashups. The leadership wanted all employees to be better connected so they could be on the same level of understanding, excitement, and commitment to this transition.

They also thought that using a web 2.0 tool, like Facebook, represented the best way to take the whole company into this new space.

Like many companies their existing intranet was a poor platform for document finding, much less sharing….. I have also seen many unsuccessful intranets that cost large sums so I could certainly understand what René was talking about. One of major flaws of existing intranets, even when they work to find stuff, is the lack of social context. It is difficult to find anything about people. Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people.

(The emphasis is mine.)

For more on this forward thinking approach, please see Bill Ives’s blog entry here: Portals and KM: Serena has Adopted Facebook as their Intranet