Tag Archives: Digital Natives

Transitioning from a Bossy Boss into a Digital Age Leader [Series Conclusion]

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Now that we are to the end of our 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion about digital management over the last seven posts. This series was born of our frustration with patterns of leadership in digital organizations: overly directing leaders stifle their team while hands-off leaders fail to provide critical direction. Neither culture is leading effectively!

Digital managers have to be two things at once

We felt that our “cultural intuition” is failing us.  That drove us to describe what’s broken and how to fix it.

Digital work and workers operate in a new model where top-down management is neither appropriate nor effective. To point, many digital workers actively resist being given too much direction, rules or structure. No, we are not throwing out management; on the contrary, we believe management is more important than ever, but changes to both work and workers has made it much harder than before.

That’s especially true when Boomers and Millennials try to work together because of differences in leadership experience and expectation. As Brad is always pointing out in his book Liquid Leadership, “what motivates a Millennial will not motivate a Boomer,” or even a Gen Xer.

Millennials may be so uncomfortable having to set limits and enforce decisions that they avoid exerting the very leadership that digital workers need! While GenX and Boomers may be creating and expecting unrealistic deadlines simply because they truly do not understand the depth of the work involved.

So who’s right and who’s wrong? As we’ve pointed out in previous posts, it’s neither! Why? Because unlike Industrial Age Models, there is no one way to get something done in The Information Age.

We desperately need a management model that works for everyone. How does a digital manager know when it’s time to be directing? If you’ve communicated a shared purpose well then you are always at liberty to 1) ask your team if this is aligned and 2) quickly stop any activity that is not aligned.

The trap we see for digital managers who have not communicated the shared goals is that they lack the team authority to take the lead.

We believe that digital leadership requires finding a middle ground using these three guidelines:

  1. Clearly express your intent and trust, don’t force, your team will follow it
  2. Respect your teams’ ability to make good decisions around the intent.
  3. Don’t be shy to exercise your authority when your team needs direction

Digital management is hard: you don’t get the luxury of authority or the comfort of certainty.

If you are used to directing then you have to trust yourself to communicate clearly at an abstract level and then let go of the details. If you are used to being hands-off then you have to get over being specific and assertive when the situation demands it.

Our frustration was that neither Boomer nor Millennial culture is providing effective management. Instead, we realized that elements of both are required. It’s up to the digital manager to learn when each mode is required.

Thank you for following along. It has been an honor.

Management free falling! Why The Zappos & Valve Model is Terrifying [Post 4 of 8]

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Forth IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.  — Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Computers

Trust, not stability, is the new management contract. Digital workers interpret “strong” management as a lack of trust. Megaphone!

Before we can talk about how to manage digital workers, we have to talk about trusting them to do their jobs. Why? Digital workers largely adopt Millennials’ unwillingness to follow directed leadership.  If we want to succeed in managing them then we need to foster mutual respect that is built on bi-directional trust.

20th Century business models were based on “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” thinking that went along with mass manufacturing control, discipline and predictability. Physical goods were sold to a passive marketplace with minimal feedback from markets and internal workers; consequently, decisions could be made by a few leaders as long as workers did what they were told. All out-of-the-box decision had to go through a leader. The bigger the decision, the higher up that decision needs to go for approval. Like in our symphony analogy, control and discipline is the main ideology.

In 21st Century business, there is no script just as there is no score for a Jazz concert. That does not mean it’s a worker free-for-all! We still need to deliver products. But instead of top-down control, we talk about collaboration, shared mission and team work. This change is critical because digital work as so much situational content that it is impossible to proscribe it’s exact results in advance. Like Jazz, you can create a general framework and guidelines but the exact composition has a degree of improvisation because it must reflect the players’ situation in the moment.

Since you have to trust people to make decisions, you’d better create an environment where they want to make the best decisions for your business!

Glassdoor’s multiyear study discovered that the “Best Places to Work” from 2009 to 2014 outperformed the S&P 500 by 115.6% while a similar portfolio named Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For,” outperformed the S&P 500 by 84.2%! That is impressive.

What does trust look like? Leading gaming software maker Valve has thrown out the traditional employee handbook and replaced it with a 37 page breakdown of what they expect from an employee. The manual tells people their desk is on wheels so they can just roll over to a new team if they want to change jobs. The trust implied in that type of follow-your-passion enablement is unheard of in most workplaces.

Zappos, recognized 6 years in a row by FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For®, pays employees $4,500 to quit if not satisfied with the culture. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is advocates for a no management whatsoever model called Holacracy. Like Valve, Zappos counts of their hiring process to find workers who thrive in a self-led model where leadership is fluid and people organize themselves to solve problems and deliver value.

If our undirected Jazz model scares you, Holacracy will terrify you.

However, it’s critical to understand that neither Zappos nor Value are “wild west” work environments. Like a top Jazz ensemble they provide trained performers, concrete structure, appropriate tools and clear expectations. By giving your teams the right tools to know what to do when they are working on their own, you will see a different workforce, striving to make your company better than even you thought possible.

Why does this work? In digital work, we have to give up the idea that the knighted leaders make the best decisions.

It’s not just a question of good decisions, we also need to improve quality and speed of action. Check out Navy Submarine Captain David Marquet’s talk on Greatness, based on his book, Turn The Ship Around! He explains quite well why people should be allowed to think and take responsibility for their work. 

In the end, it’s simply physics. Without trust, all decisions must flow downward and the entire organization is limited by the leadership. Our information economy makes it simply impossible for leaders to sufficiently learn and react. When people are trusted to think for themselves and take control for the products they create there is a psychological shift. They take ownership in their work. That means quality and output go through the roof as they get competitive with creating a wow product.

So, how can you create a company culture that taps into the skills sets of a new digital worker yet engages everyone for the long haul? Let’s dig in and instead of giving you rules or regulations, let’s start with a few principles to create the right environment.

Tune it for our next post: Setting direction – how too much freedom is bad too.

Jazz vs. Symphony: Why micromanaging digital work FAILS. [post 3 of 8]

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Third IN AN 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

Now that we’ve introduced music as a functional analogy for a stable 21st century leadership model and defined digital work, we’re ready to expose how work actually gets done in the information age.

First, has work really changed?  Yes.  Traditionally there was a distinct difference between organized production and service-based/creative work such as advertising, accounting or medicine.  Solve a problem by looking for clues and coming up with creative solutions to solve it.

Jazz Hands By RevolvingRevolver on DeviantArt http://revolvingrevolver.deviantart.com/

Digital work on the other hand, and more importantly – digital workers, live in a strange limbo of doing creative work but needing business structures and management models that were developed during the industrial age.

In today’s multi-generational workforce, what appears to be a generational divide has transformed into a non-age-specific cultural rift. As Brad and Rob compared notes, we came to believe that what is really happening is a learned difference in the approach to work and work culture.

There is learned difference in the approach to work and work culture that’s more obvious in, but not limited to, digital natives.

In most companies, the executives are traditionalists (Baby Boomers or hand-selected by Boomers).  While previous generations have been trained to follow hierarchy, the new culture values performance, flexibility and teamwork with a less top-down control oriented outlook.

It’s like a symphonic conductor who is used to picking the chair order and directing the tempo is handing out sheet music to a Jazz ensemble.  So how is the traditional manager going to deliver a stellar performance when his performers are Jazz trained?

In traditional concert orchestra, each musician has to go to college, train hard, earn a shot to get into the orchestra, and overtime, work very hard to earn the First Chair position (think earning the corner office).  Once in that position, they stay there until death or retirement.  Anyone who deviates, is fired. Improv is only allowed during certain songs, by a select few.  It’s the workplace equivalent to climbing the corporate ladder.

Most digital workers think they belong to a Jazz ensemble.  

It’s a mistake to believe less organized means less skilled.  Workers in the Jazz model are also talented and trained professionals.  If you look at the careers of Thelonius Monk, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, they all had formal training, many started as children.  The same is true for digital workers: many started build job skills as children and then honed their teamwork playing video games.

But can a loosely organized group consistently deliver results? Yes. In fact, they deliver better results!

When a Jazz Improv group plays, they have a rough composition to start with. Each member is given time for a solo.  To the uninitiated there appears to be no leaders in this milieu of talent, but the leader is there.  They just refuse to control the performance; instead, they trust that each member will bring their A Game and perform at 100% of their capacity.

In business, this is scary. Don’t we need someone to check each person’s work? People are just messing around right? I mean, is this actual work? Who is in charge?

In businesss environments that operate more like Jazz, studies have proven that there is a 32% increase in productivity from traditional command and control environments driven by hierarchy.

Age, experience and position are NOT the criteria for the Digital Worker. Output is.  And output is different for each product. Management’s role in this model is to get out of the way and let the musicians create. Instead of conforming to a single style and method, the people producing in the model each bring something unique and also experience a high degree of ownership.

This is a powerful type of workplace diversity: by allowing different ways of problem solving to co-exist, we also make the workplace more inclusive and collaborative.

Sound too good to be true?  In our next post we’ll discuss trust as the critical ingredient for Jazz performance.  (Teaser)

What Is digital “work?” Can we sell a cloud of smoke? Yes and the impacts are very tangible. [2 of 8]

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IN THIS second in an 8 POST SERIES, BRAD SZOLLOSE AND ROB HIRSCHFELD INVITE YOU TO SHARE IN OUR DISCUSSION ABOUT FAILURES, FIGHTS AND FRIGHTENING TRANSFORMATIONS GOING ON AROUND US AS DIGITAL WORK CHANGES WORKPLACE DELIVERABLES, PLANNING AND CULTURE.

So, what is a Digital worker?  Before we talk about managing them, we need to agree to the very concept of digital work.

A Digital Worker is someone who creates value primarily by creating virtual goods and services.  This creates a challenge for traditional work because, in the physical world, no material goods were created.

ManagersBack in The Day, this type of work was equivalent to selling day dreams – it had no material value. It was intangible.

To today’s tech savvy workforce, even though their output exists simply as numbers in the “cloud,” digital work is tangible to digital natives.

Tangible work is directly consumable. If I create something I can see it, hold it in my hands. Eat it and enjoy it in the three dimensional meatverse we call “reality.” So, If I baked a pie and Brad ate it then I produced consumable work. That same rule applies for digital work like this blog post that Brad and I produced and you are reading. It’s nothing more than photons on a screen, but the value is immense and you can see the tangible results of our work.

The entire industrial age up until now was driven by a basic premise of effort equals results so eloquently stated by management consultant, Peter Drucker…“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

But much of what we do in the nascent stage of Digital Age, the beginning of the 21st Century, can NOT be measured using traditional value placements.

Case in point, what happens if we only worked when our spouses told us it was time to stop playing Candy Crush and get back to writing? We’re still producing digital work but now our spouses have taken on the role of managers. While they played an essential part in the content being created, their input is intangible and something that cannot be measured. Our spouse becomes the influencer in this model.

We need to revisit “If You Can’t Measure It You Can’t Manage.”  It is BS! no longer applies in digital work.

This distinction is important because we want to distinguish between digital workers and managers. They do very similar actions (type on keyboards, send email, go to meetings), but one creates digital goods while the other coordinates the creation of digital goods.

In the world of physical goods, the people coordinating HOW the work gets done have a significant amount of power. They provide the raw materials, tools, capital, supply chains and other requirements to get the goods to market. i.e…logistics. The actions of any single worker cannot scale in a meaningful way without management being involved; consequently, management has a tremendous amount of power (and corresponding respect) in the worker-manager relationship paradigm. This is not just for industrial work, the same applies to farming, singing, writing or other industries and defines most work in the pre-digital world of the Boomers, Traditionalists and earlier generations.

But let’s extend our simple example to a team of animators creating special effects for a movie. Pixar for example. The work requires each member of the team to already be up to speed on their specific role in the animation process. Whether a sculptor, character development, a digital set designer or character animator, each member knows what they need to do to be their very best, and how to reach their own deadlines. They are self managed and the very best at their jobs. And each is in charge of creating from the digital universe the same logistics mentioned above. Instead of management providing that support, the digital worker is their own support within the team.

The digital world inverts the traditional worker-manager dynamic.

With digital goods, the raw materials, tools, capital, supply chains and other requirements to get the goods to market. i.e…again, logistics are readily available so the worker’s creativity and effort become the critical resource.

A so called “manager” in this framework has one job: to provide the support and right environment to get the work done. Like a beekeeper, he must trust that each bee knows how to create honey. His or her job is to make their jobs friction free by making the environment the very best to get that work done. Trust is the key word.

bunny slippersThere is still need for management and coordination, but the power dynamic has been radically altered. While anyone could follow Rob’s pie recipe, you cannot simply replace his role as co-author on this blog post. Even more radical, there’s often no perceived need for managers at all!  Digital workers simply order pizza and produce digital goods in their bathrobe and bunny slippers.

While this vision is held as a core belief by many digital natives, we don’t believe it entirely.

But wait Rob and Brad, what about those YouTube millionaires who upload cat videos and cash in?  In those cases, there is a lot of invisible coordination in the distribution channel. The massive infrastructure needed to deliver Grumpy Cat is also digital work and Google invests vast sums of money to reduce the friction connecting those content creators and consumers. [Google and YouTube are the beekeeper.]

We believe the need for coordination of digital work is a critical and necessary component for real digital work to get done on time. Unfortunately, the inversion of power means that managers have neither the authority not resource controls that were in place when “modern management techniques” were created.

Our focus here is not on the lone wolf digital workers, but instead, we are focused on the collaborative digital worker. Those people who must collaborate with each other to deliver their goods. For those workers, there is a need for capital, supply chains and coordination. Their work is just a bit of the larger digital whole.

If “modern management” does not work for digital workers then what does?

Let’s keep in mind as we explore this discussion that these are High Trust environments and the subject for our next 6 posts.  Read post 3.

Three critical ingredients for digital age relationships. [Collaborate Series 8/8]

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Translation: Are you ready to apply these lessons?

This post is the final post in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

End of LineDuring this blog series, we’ve explored how important culture is in the work place.  The high tech areas are especially sensitive because they disproportionately embrace the millennial culture which often causes conflicts.

Our world has changed, driven by technology, new thinking, and new methodologies yet we may be using 20th century management techniques on 21st century customers and workers. There is an old business axiom that states, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”  Yet how much of our process, interaction, successes, and failures never wind up on a spreadsheet, yet impact it?

Customers don’t leave bad companies; they leave companies that miss the mark when it comes to customer engagement. To better serve our customers we need to understand and adapt to the psychology of a new customer … one who has been trained to work as a Digital Native.

What would that look like? Tech people who interact with patience, collaboration, deep knowledge, and an openness to input, adapting to a customer’s needs in real-time. Wouldn’t that create a relationship that is second to none and unbreakable? Wouldn’t that be a leg up on the competition?

By understanding that new business culture has been influenced by the gaming experience, we have a deeper understanding of what is important to our customer base. And like a video game, if you cling to hierarchy, you lose. If you get caught up in linear time management, you lose. If you cling to bottlenecks and tradition you lose.

Three key takeaways: speed, adaptation, and collaboration

Those three words sum up today’s business environment. By now, you should not be surprised that those drivers are skills honed in video games.

We’ve explored the radically different ways that Digital Natives approach business opportunities. As the emerging leaders of the technological world, we must shift our operations to be more open, collaborative, iterative, and experience based.

Rob challenges you to get involved in his and other collaborative open source projects. Brad challenges you to try new leadership styles that engage with the Cloud Generation. Together, we challenge our entire industry to embrace a new paradigm that redefines how we interact and innovate. We may as well embrace it because it is the paradigm that we’ve already trained the rising generation or workers to intuitively understand.

What’s next?

Brad and Rob collaborated on this series with the idea of extending the concepts beyond a discussion of the “digital divide” and really looking at how culture impacts business leadership.  Lately, we’ve witnessed that the digital divide is not about your birthday alone.  We’ve seen that age alone does not drive the all cultural differences we’ve described here.  Our next posts will reflect the foundations for different ways that we’ve seen people respond to each other with a focus on answering “can digital age workers deliver?”

Like the conclusion?  Reading the rest of the series! 1: Intro > 2: ToC > 3: Video Reality > 4: Authority > 5: On The Game Training > 6: Win by Failing > 7: Go Digital Native > 8: Three Takeaways

 

Cloud Culture: Becoming L33T – Five ways to “go digital native” [Collaborative Series 7/8]

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Subtitle: Five keys to earn Digital Natives’ trust

This post is #7 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

WARNING: These are not universal rules! These are two cultures. What gets high scores for Digital Natives is likely to get you sacked with Digital Immigrants.

How do Digital Natives do business?

You've gotta deal with itYou don’t sell! You collaborate with them to help solve their problems. They’ll discredit everything say if you “go all marketing on them” and try to “sell them.”

Here are five ways that you can build a two-way collaborative relationship instead of one-way selling. These tips aren’t speculation: Brad has proven these ideas work in real-world business situations.

Interested in Digital Native Culture?  We recommend reading (more books):

1) Share, don’t tell.

Remember the cultural response in Rob’s presentation discussed in the introduction to this paper? The shift took place because Rob wanted to share his expertise instead of selling the awesomeness of his employeer. This is what changed the dynamic.

In a selling situation, the sales pitch doesn’t address our client’s needs. It addresses what we want to tell them and what we think they need. It is a one-way conversation. And if someone has a choice between saying “yes” or “no” in a sales meeting, a client can always have the choice to say “no.”

Sharing draws our customers in so we can hear their problems and solve them. We can also get a barometer on what they know versus what they need. When Rob is presenting to a customer, he’s qualifying the customer too. Solutions are not one size fits all and Digital Natives respect you more for admitting this to them.

Digital Native business is about going for a long-term solution-driven approach instead of just positioning a product. If you’ve collaborated with customers and they agree you’ve got a solution for them then it’s much easier to close the sale. And over the long term, it’s a more lucrative way to do business.

2) Eliminate bottlenecks.

Ten years ago, IT departments were the bottleneck to getting products into the market. If customers resisted, it could take years to get them to like something new. Today, Apple introduces new products every six month with a massive adoption rate because Digital Natives don’t wait for permission from an authority.

The IT buyer has made that sales cycle much more dynamic because our new buyers are Digital Natives. Where Digital Immigrants stayed entrenched in a process or technology, Digital Natives are more willing to try something unproven. Amazon’s EC2 public cloud presented a huge challenge to the authority of IT departments because developers were simply bypassing internal controls. Digital Natives have been trained to look for out-of-the-box solutions to problems.

Time-to-market has become the critical measure for success.

We now have IT end-user buyers who adopt and move faster through the decision process than ever before! We interfere with their decision process if we still treating new buyers as if they can’t keep up and we have to educate them.

Today’s Digital Workers are smart, self-starters who more than understand technology; they live it. Their intuitive nature toward technology and the capacity to use it without much effort has become a cultural skill set. Also they can look up, absorb, and comprehend products without much effort. They did their homework before we walked in the door.

Digital Natives are impatient. They want to skip over what they know and get to real purpose and collaboration. You add bottlenecks when you force them back into a traditional decision process that avoids risk; instead, they are looking to business partners to help them iterate and accelerate.

 How did this apply to the Crowbar project?

Crowbar addresses a generation’s impatience to be up and running in record time. But there is more to it than that: we engage with customers differently too. Our open source collaboration and design flexibility mean that we can dialog with customers and partners to figure out the real wants and needs in record time.

3) Let go of linear.

Digital Natives do not want to be walked through detailed linear presentations. They do want the information but leave out the hand holding. The best strategy is to prepare to be a well-trained digital commando—plan a direction, be confident, be ready to respond, and be willing to admit knowledge gaps. It’s a strategy without a strategy.

Ask questions at the beginning of a meeting—this becomes a knowledge base “smell test.” Listening to what our clients know and don’t know gets us to the heart and purpose of why we are there. Take notes. Stay open to curve balls, tough questions, and—dare we say it—the client telling us we are off base. You should not be surprised at how much they know.

For open source projects at Dell (Rob’s Employeer), customers have often downloaded and installed the product before they have talked to the sales team. Rob has had to stop being surprised when they are better informed about our offerings than our well trained internal teams. Digital Natives love collecting information and getting started independently. This completely violates the normal linear sales process; instead, customers enter more engaged and ready if you can be flexible enough to meet them where they already are.

4) Be attentively interactive.

No one likes to sit in one meeting after another. Why are meetings boring? Meetings should be engaging and collaborative; unfortunately, most meetings are simply one-way presentations or status updates. When Digital Natives interrupt a presentation, it may mean they are not getting what they want but it also means they are paying attention.

Aren’t instant messaging, texting, and tweeting attention-stealing distractions?

Don’t confuse IMing, texting, emailing, and tweeting as lack of attention or engagement.

Digital Natives use these “back channels” to speed up knowledge sharing while eliminating the face-to-face meeting inertia of centralized communication.

Of course, sometimes we do check out and stop paying attention.

Time and attention are valuable commodities!

With all the distractions and multi-tasking for speed and connectivity, giving someone undivided attention is about respect, and paying attention is not passive! When we ask questions, it shows that we’re engaged and paying attention. When we compile all the answers from those questions, our intention leads us to solutions. Solving our client’s problems is about getting to the heart of the matter and becomes the driving force behind every action and solution.

Don’t be afraid to stray from the agenda—our attention is the agenda.

5) Stay open to happy accidents.

In Brad’s book, Liquid Leadership, the chapter titled “Have Laptop. Will Travel” points out how Digital Natives have been trained in virtualized work habits because they are more effective.

Our customers are looking for innovative solutions to their problems and may find them in places that we do not expect. It is our job to stay awake and open to solution serendipity. Let’s take this statement out of our vocabulary: “That’s not how we do it.” Let’s try a new approach: “That isn’t traditionally how we would do it, but let us see if it could improve things.”

McDonald’s uses numbers for their combo meals to make sure ordering is predictable and takes no more than 30 seconds. It sounds simple, but changes come from listening to customers’ habits. We need to stop judging and start adapting. Imagine a company that adapts to the needs of its customers?

Sales guru Jeffery Gitomer pays $100 in cash to any one of his employees who makes a mistake. This mistake is analyzed to figure out if it is worthy of application or to be discarded. He doesn’t pay $100 if they make the same mistake twice. Mistakes are where we can discover breakthrough ideas, products, and methods.

Making these kinds of leaps requires that we first let go of rigid rules and opinions and make it OK to make a few mistakes … as long as we look at them through a lens of possibility. Digital Natives have spent 10,000 hours playing learning to make mistakes, take risks, and reach mastery.

Keep Reading! Next post is Three Takeaways (previous Win by Failing)

 

 

Cloud Culture: Level up – You win the game by failing successfully [Collaborative Series 6/8]

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Translation: Learn by playing, fail fast, and embrace risk.

This post is #6 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

It's good to failDigital Natives have been trained to learn the rules of the game by just leaping in and trying. They seek out mentors, learn the politics at each level, and fail as many times as possible in order to learn how NOT to do something. Think about it this way: You gain more experience when you try and fail quickly then carefully planning every step of your journey. As long as you are willing to make adjustments to your plans, experience always trumps prediction.

Just like in life and business, games no longer come with an instruction manual.

In Wii Sports, users learn the basic in-game and figure out the subtlety of the game as they level up. Tom Bissel, in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, explains that the in-game learning model is core to the evolution of video games. Game design involves interactive learning through the game experience; consequently, we’ve trained Digital Natives that success comes from overcoming failure.

Early failure is the expected process for mastery.

You don’t believe that games lead to better decision making in real life? In a January 2010 article, WIRED magazine reported that observations of the new generation of football players showed they had adapted tactics learned in Madden NFL to the field. It is not just the number of virtual downs played; these players have gained a strategic field-level perspective on the game that was before limited only to coaches. Their experience playing video games has shattered the on-field hierarchy.

For your amusement…Here is a video about L33T versus N00B culture From College Humor “L33Ts don’t date N00Bs.”  Youtu.be/JVfVqfIN8_c

Digital Natives embrace iterations and risk as a normal part of the life.

Risk is also a trait we see in entrepreneurial startups. Changing the way we did things before requires you to push the boundaries, try something new, and consistently discard what doesn’t work. In Lean Startup Lessons Learned, Eric Ries built his entire business model around the try-learn-adjust process. He’s shown that iterations don’t just work, they consistently out innovate the competition.

The entire reason Dell grew from a dorm to a multinational company is due to this type of fast-paced, customer-driven interactive learning. You are either creating something revolutionary or you will be quickly phased out of the Information Age. No one stays at the top just because he or she is cash rich anymore. Today’s Information Age company needs to be willing to reinvent itself consistently … and systematically.

Why do you think larger corporations that embrace entrepreneurship within their walls seem to survive through the worst of times and prosper like crazy during the good times?

Gamer have learned that Risk that has purpose will earn you rewards.

Cloud Culture: Online Games, the real job training for Digital Natives [Collaborative Series 5/8]

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Translation: Why do Digital Natives value collaboration over authority?

Kids Today

This post is #5 in an collaborative eight part series by Brad Szollose and I about how culture shapes technology.

Before we start, we already know that some of you are cynical about what we are suggesting—Video games? Are you serious? But we’re not talking about Ms. Pac-Man. We are talking about deeply complex, rich storytelling, and task-driven games that rely on multiple missions, worldwide player communities, working together on a singular mission.

Leaders in the Cloud Generation not just know this environment, they excel in it.

The next generation of technology decision makers is made up of self-selected masters of the games. They enjoy the flow of learning and solving problems; however, they don’t expect to solve them alone or a single way. Today’s games are not about getting blocks to fall into lines; they are complex and nuanced. Winning is not about reflexes and reaction times; winning is about being adaptive and resourceful.

In these environments, it can look like chaos. Digital workspaces and processes are not random; they are leveraging new-generation skills. In the book Different, Youngme Moon explains how innovations looks crazy when they are first revealed. How is the work getting done? What is the goal here? These are called “results only work environments,” and studies have shown they increase productivity significantly.

Digital Natives reject top-down hierarchy.

These college educated self-starters are not rebels; they just understand that success is about process and dealing with complexity. They don’t need someone to spoon feed them instructions.

Studies at MIT and The London School of Economics have revealed that when high-end results are needed, giving people self-direction, the ability to master complex tasks, and the ability to serve a larger mission outside of themselves will garnish groundbreaking results.

Gaming does not create mind-addled Mountain Dew-addicted unhygienic drone workers. Digital Natives raised on video games are smart, computer savvy, educated, and, believe it or not, resourceful independent thinkers.

Thomas Edison said:

“I didn’t fail 3,000 times. I found 3,000 ways how not to create a light bulb.”

Being comfortable with making mistakes thousands of times ’til mastery sounds counter-intuitive until you realize that is how some of the greatest breakthroughs in science and physics were discovered.  Thomas Edison made 3,000 failed iterations in creating the light bulb.

Level up: You win the game by failing successfully.

Translation: Learn by playing, fail fast, and embrace risk.

Digital Natives have been trained to learn the rules of the game by just leaping in and trying. They seek out mentors, learn the politics at each level, and fail as many times as possible in order to learn how NOT to do something. Think about it this way: You gain more experience when you try and fail quickly then carefully planning every step of your journey. As long as you are willing to make adjustments to your plans, experience always trumps prediction.Just like in life and business, games no longer come with an instruction manual.

In Wii Sports, users learn the basic in-game and figure out the subtlety of the game as they level up. Tom Bissel, in Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, explains that the in-game learning model is core to the evolution of video games. Game design involves interactive learning through the game experience; consequently, we’ve trained Digital Natives that success comes from overcoming failure.

Keep Reading! Win by Failing (previous Authority)

Cloud Culture: New IT leaders are transforming the way we create and purchase technology. [Collaborative Series 1/8]

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Subtitle: Why L33Ts don’t buy from N00Bs

Brad Szollose and I want to engage you in a discussion about how culture shapes technology [cross post link].  We connected over Brad’s best-selling book, Liquid Leadership, and we’ve been geeking about cultural impacts in tech since 2011.

Rob Hirschfeld

Rob

Brad

In these 8 posts, we explore what drives the next generation of IT decision makers starting from the framework of Millennials and Boomers.  Recently, we’ve seen that these “age based generations” are artificially limiting; however, they provide a workable context this series that we will revisit in the future.

Here’s the list of posts: 1: Intro > 2: ToC > 3: Video Reality > 4: Authority > 5: On The Game Training > 6: Win by Failing > 7: Go Digital Native > 8: Three Takeaways

Our target is leaders who were raised with computers as Digital Natives. They approach business decisions from a new perspective that has been honed by thousands of hours of interactive games, collaboration with global communities, and intuitive mastery of all things digital.

The members of this “Generation Cloud” are not just more comfortable with technology; they use it differently and interact with each other in highly connected communities. They function easily with minimal supervision, self-organize into diverse teams, dive into new situations, take risks easily, and adapt strategies fluidly. Using cloud technologies and computer games, they have become very effective winners.

In this series, we examine three key aspects of next-generation leaders and offer five points to get to the top of your game. Our goal is to find, nurture, and collaborate with them because they are rewriting the script for success.

We have seen that there is a technology-driven culture change that is reshaping how business is being practiced.  Let’s dig in!

What is Liquid Leadership?

“a fluid style of leadership that continuously sustains the flow of ideas in an organization in order to create opportunities in an ever-shifting marketplace.”

Forever Learning?

In his groundbreaking 1970s book, Future Shock, Alvin Toffler pointed out that in the not too distant future, technology would inundate the human race with all its demands, overwhelming those not prepared for it. He compared this overwhelming feeling to culture shock.

Welcome to the future!

Part of the journey in discussing this topic is to embrace the digital lexicon. To help with translations we are offering numerous subtitles and sidebars. For example, the subtitle “L33Ts don’t buy from N00Bs” translates to “Digital elites don’t buy from technical newcomers.”

Loosen your tie and relax; we’re going to have some fun together.  We’ve got 7 more posts in this cloud culture series: 2: ToC > 3: Video Reality > 4: Authority > 5: On The Game Training > 6: Win by Failing > 7: Go Digital Native > 8: Three Takeaways

We’ve also included more background about the series and authors…

Continue reading →