This post on Library crunch made it into my “Blog this” folder back in February, and I’m finally doing some spring cleaning.
Michael Casey links to some ideas from Richard Macmanus and a whitepaper by Rod Boothby. The basic premise is that the next round of MBA graduates (I’ll be able to count myself in that group in August ’06) know how to work differently. From my perspective, he’s right. My coursework has been completed exclusively through the University of Maryland University College’s online classroom. Almost half of my assignments are collaborative, and another quarter require online conference interaction. We email, we teleconference, we chat. We know how to self organize, chose task leaders, and get things done. And I’ve never met any of my teammates in person. Sometimes we have to work around time zone differences to accommodate teammates who are living or traveling across the world. And all this is just the mechanics. Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat was required reading this semester. We’re coming out reading to fight in a global marketplace, connecting by a myriad of communications links forming a web around us…
But even with all that, we’re behind the curve. As the next decade passes, we have the email generation, the IM generation, the livejournal, generation, the myspace generation, and the second life generation, all entering the workforce. Then a subset of them will get MBA’s, or mature into management roles. These folks are going to fundamentally change the dynamics of business. Robert Scoble touches on this in his recent Moonshot post. The handshake is out, the business trip, phone calls and voicemail are going to fade away. Coming out of high school, many students will have more collaborative skills then most businessmen of decades past.
One Man Shouting 