Q&A: Don Tapscott
Guest speaker at this year's Annual IDM Lunch is world leading business and technology strategist, Don Tapscott. Ranked in the top thirty of Accenture's seminal list of the world's Top Business Gurus, Don is a regular advisor to both governments and international corporations on the value and impact of technology in business. He is also the acclaimed author of the best-selling Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics.
We were intrigued to know his views on how technology and the "Net Generation" will continue to impact on our marketing. This is what we asked him.
Technology - friend or foe? Is 'always on' always a good thing?
Technology is a friend if you keep it in its proper place. It should be your servant, not your master. I don't think it's reasonable to expect employees to be "on" 24/7. People need down time that they can spend with family and friends.
It's widely known that you have advised governments. What would you advise them to do to help us out of recession?
This is a topic that I've spent a lot of time on recently. To establish trust and stability we need to make dramatic changes to the financial services industry. Government throwing money at the problem is not restoring confidence in the system. We need a global forensic exercise to open up the entire financial services industry. We need to apply the principles of Wikinomics and bake transparency into the system. I encourage readers to visit www.wrap20.com, which is short for Wiki Risk Assessment Process 2.0.
The best system would have an open, transparent and collaborative process for valuing and risk-assessing non-government credit securities and related instruments and contracts. By tapping the 'Wisdom of the Crowd', WRAP would introduce transparency and peering to value and risk measurement benchmarking. It will invite all of the best valuation modeling minds to collaborate in the process. This would contribute significantly to restoring confidence and liquidity in the world's credit markets.
How do we find and nurture the new 'wikinomic' talent that will take business forward?
Look to your young employees. One of the best examples of a company nurturing wikinomic thinking is American consumer electronics retailing giant Best Buy. The CEO, Brad Anderson, says that the most important people in the company are the tens of thousands of young people in blue shirts that work in the stores. Anderson told me these young employees "are closest to our customers, are most like our customers, and their culture is the culture of the 21st century Best Buy."
Anderson says that his job is not so much to make decisions but rather to create the conditions in which his young customer-facing employees can self-organise and help reinvent the company. The company has an online social network where 25,000 young employees regularly gather to brainstorm and share insights. Management pays attention. Anderson says he is in the business of "unleashing the power of net generation human capital."
Is there anything left for you to learn in your particular field?
There is a great deal left for me to learn or discover. These are still the early stages of the Internet and its evolution. Think how relatively primitive the Internet was in the mid 1990s when I wrote my first book about the Net Generation, Growing Up Digital. The Net was based on html and was a platform for the presentation of content. People talked about eyeballs, clicks and "stickiness" of web sites. But I could see in the way young people were using the net to communicate – rather than just access websites — that the future of the internet was about communication and collaboration.
Today the internet is broadband, based on xml, and a platform for collaboration. We have services such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. And ten years from now there will be a wide array of new services to help us connect with one another and collectively apply human ingenuity. I don't know what form that will take, but I do know that we've only scratched the surface of what is possible.
If you were to give one piece of advice to today's marketers, what would it be?
Understand that the old industrial approaches to product definition and product marketing are obsolete. In a world where customers are informed, fickle, and have choice, and where margins are thin, and profitable growth can be elusive, delivering a compelling customer experience can make all the difference. You need to set the context for rich, enduring experiences to occur. Today's young consumers want to be involved in co-innovating products.
Got a question for Don?
Then ask him in person! The Annual IDM Lunch takes place on 26 March at London's Millennium Mayfair Hotel.
More about Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott is an internationally renowned authority on the strategic value and impact of information technology. He has authored or co-authored eleven widely read books on technology and business. His most recent book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is an international bestseller, has appeared on the New York Times and BusinessWeek bestseller lists, and has been translated into 19 languages.
Based on the largest investigation of strategic IT in business ever conducted, Wikinomics explains how companies can tap the full potential of the networked economy and its self-organised, mass-participatory communities.
His next book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing the World, explores how the first generation to grow up with the Net is redefining today's workplace, marketplace, schools, family and government.Grown Up Digital has an indispensable message for all organisations that seek to turn the NetGen's talents and worldview into competitive advantage.
Tapscott is Chairman of nGenera Innovation Network and an Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He currently is heading up four multi-million dollar research programmes.
An enthralling and inspiring orator, Don is often described by customers as the most effective speaker they have ever heard.
