A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to give a lecture on Leadership 2.0 for the Confederation of Entrepreneurs of Navarra (CEN), as part of the cycle Meeting You, Positive Management. As a result of that experience, I was interviewed in a lecture that has just been published in Cen 7DÍAS and that captures the spirit of this blog well. In it I explain the impact that the incorporation of the new Digital Natives into the labor market will have on organizations.
I reproduce it below:
“The culture of Digital Natives is shaking up the company as we know it”
The honorary president of Sun Microsystems Iberia and managing partner of the consulting firm Innopersonas, José Cabrera, explains in this interview how the incorporation of the first generation of young people who have been born and raised with digital devices is affecting the business world.
QUESTION: Your presentation at the conferences of the Meeting You cycle focused on Leadership 2.0 as a new model of business leadership necessary for the Era of Collaboration. What does this new paradigm consist of?
ANSWER: The essence of this new era is mass collaboration. The constant interaction of users through a technological platform that is already available (Web 2.0) has allowed us to reach a level of knowledge unimaginable in the entire history of humanity. The opportunities to learn and develop are enormous. Today we can all participate voluntarily on an equal footing, creating and sharing from anywhere, collaboratively and globally in networks based on trust. And this is just the beginning. The advance of the Age of Collaboration is already unstoppable, propelled by the arrival in our schools and organizations of the first generation of young “digital natives”, by the creation of new social structures that surpass all previous ones in complexity, and by the emergence of new models of value creation based on open collaboration between global communities. The new era involves substantial changes in the very nature of our society, has a profound impact on our institutions and models of government, and presents challenges for all of us that we have not seen before.
Q. What is the impact of these changes on organizations?
A. Today it is essential to react quickly to changes, but the fact is that we have extremely complex, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations, too slow to make decisions. We need to be agile and flexible, but we have built opaque, slow and cumbersome structures and processes. The problem is that we continue to use the mental schemes and tools of traditional management to deal with a completely new situation. In other words, we use recipes from the Industrial Age (created at the beginning of the last century) to respond to new demands. And the result cannot be satisfactory. The old hierarchies and management structures are a real brake on creativity and innovation in our organizations, but, like any legacy, they resist disappearing. The reality is that most of the “hierarchy” adds little or no value to organizations. Quite the opposite. Hierarchical structures act as “passion killers”: they don’t let our employees release the creativity, passion and talent they have inside, and prevent them from getting involved and committed to the work they do. We need change. We need new open, agile and flexible structures, which allow us to be able to respond to changes, and to attract and retain new talent from Digital Natives. The impact is being definitive. Many organizations, which not so long ago were prominent market leaders, have disappeared, or are in serious difficulty, unable to adapt to new demands. Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to stay ahead of the curve of change.
P. So, what can organizations do to meet these new challenges?
A. If everything has changed around us, if everything continues to change at an increasingly accelerated pace, the only way for organizations is for us to be able to innovate all the time and at all levels. Only in this way will we be able to discover a new territory full of opportunities. Organizations must, on the one hand, adjust their operating structures to the new levels that the economic crisis we are experiencing entails and at the same time transform their operating structures in order to survive in a necessarily more global and competitive world. It is therefore a matter of renewing or dying. The changes that are required are not obvious. These changes are particularly difficult to anticipate if organizations have reached their “comfort zone” and continue to be lethargic thinking that they are going to solve their problems, as on other occasions, by making small adjustments to their cost structures. The problem is that innovating is not easy. To achieve this, we must be able to re-invent ourselves as leaders and as people. That is, we have to change our mental schemes to understand the new situation in which we find ourselves.
Q. What is the biggest obstacle to innovation?
A. Contrary to what many leaders think, the biggest challenge is not to have new ideas. After all, we are all capable of generating new ideas. The biggest challenge is to get rid of old ideas, and to escape the legacy left to us by orthodox management, which is the one that maintains and sustains ideas that were good in the past, but are irrelevant when facing the challenges of the future.
Q. What are the consequences of generational change?
A. The “landing” of the new generations of “Digital Natives” can be vital to incorporate creativity and innovation into the daily functioning of organizations. The first generation of young people who were born and grew up with digital devices – computers, the Internet, consoles, mobile phones – are always by their side. Their new way of seeing and understanding the world, of working, of creating and organizing, of producing and consuming, is shaking the pillars of the market as we know it. Perhaps for the first time in history, children know and handle a key technology for economic and social development better than their own parents. We could say that the culture of young people, the culture of digital media, is the one that is going to end up prevailing. It is already doing so. It is, therefore, the culture of the future. Knowing them in depth, knowing what they feel and what they are looking for, may be the most direct way to anticipate the future.
Q. How do the young people you refer to as “Digital Natives” fit into today’s organizations?
A. The reality is that many of our organizations have become bureaucratic, opaque, complicated and boring places. Too many rules and not enough direct communication, too many procedures, too much paperwork, too much wasted time. In many cases, the weight of hierarchy has managed to put an end to the passion of our employees. But the fact is that the new generation, the youngest, are not willing to submit to the traditional “command and control”. They also look for open and transparent relationships at work. If they are not comfortable, they will go elsewhere. We cannot forget that young people have the talent and creativity that organizations need to innovate. The conclusion, therefore, is that companies that are not able to attract and retain their talent will not be able to survive.
P. Finally, in your lecture you referred to “Open Software” development models as a good starting point to understand the organizations of the future, can you explain your reasons?
A. One of the reasons is that, in the face of “command and control” and the weight of hierarchy and bureaucracy, the new “Open Software” communities, such as Openoffice, Lynux or Apache, are committed to horizontal structures, in which everyone shares and contributes dynamically. People are judged by the added value they bring to the organization, not by the credentials they present. They are agile organizations where, in the face of millimetric planning and “we’ve always done it this way”, “make it happen”, “less is more”, common sense, and the ability to change quickly to adapt to new needs and new challenges in the market prevail. In today’s organizations, the performance of an activity has always been reinforced or corrected through the application of rewards and punishments by bosses. In the new networked organizations, the alignment of members is based on reputation, and on the loss of credibility that affects those who lack the codes and values agreed upon by all. Therefore, credibility (and this applies to both bosses and non-bosses) must be earned in daily action. They are organizations based on trust and self-management. Coordination is done through mutual adaptation, commitment and collaboration. A prevalent norm is that authority follows and derives from responsibility. The more an individual contributes to a project, and the more responsibility he or she assumes in concrete actions, the more authority the community grants him or her to make individual decisions. These new organizations teach us that, when there is value-added transparency, letting everyone manage their work can be the best way to motivate employees, and the most direct path to achieving shared goals. For all these reasons, I believe that the observation of these new open organizations is a good starting point to move towards a future of which we know little about it, but if one thing is certain, it is that it will not be a mere extrapolation of the past.
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