Chennai: Yes, soon the world will belong to them, to those “born after 1980, when social digital technologies, such as Usenet and bulletin board systems, came online. They all have access to networked digital technologies.”
And the key question for the rest of us is whether we are ready for the coming rulers of the world, cautions a new book on ‘the first generation of digital natives,’ Born Digital by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (www.landmarkonthenet.com).
“These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that you did growing up,” the authors observe.
“Major aspects of their lives – social interactions, friendships, civic activities – are mediated by digital technologies. And they’ve never known any other way of life.” Unlike digital ‘immigrants,’ the ‘natives’ live much of their lives online.
How do the digital natives learn? They gather information through a multi-step process that involves grazing, a ‘deep dive,’ and a feedback loop, find Palfrey and Gasser.
“The information is valuable insofar as it is timely, relevant, and easy to process. The fact that it can be accessed from anywhere – that Facebook news feed is channelled through a cell phone that is constantly attached to a digital native’s body – is equally important.”
Decisively the digital natives are changing the rules for businesses. “Digital natives offer feedback, often quite harsh, but in a way that can help brands to refine at the margins, or to innovate in wholly new ways – if in fact businesses can find a way to listen to the feedback.”
It makes sense, therefore, for companies “to offer customers a place to give direct feedback at their virtual doorstep than to ignore complaints and let them crop up everywhere.”
In the short term, the authors anticipate that the digital natives’ entrepreneurship, work habits, and consumer patterns will be disruptive. In time, however, they hope that digital natives will “revitalise the industries that they are challenging, create new jobs to replace those they are threatening, and offer new services to customers around the world.”
Compulsory read, unless you’d want to lead a life in exile from the digital world.
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Mischief manual
If you are in a mood to play the prankster in your office, John Austin’s ‘Cubicle Warfare’ (www.harpercollins.com) is a how-to manual with 101 tricks and traps. Here is a sample, at ‘difficulty level 4’: Frozen desktop, aimed at someone who is ‘somewhat computer illiterate.’
Step one, locate the ‘Print Screen’ command and execute, the author guides. “This tool will take a snapshot of your victim’s current desktop. The computer then saves the image to the Clipboard. Your next step is to paste the image into a program that will allow you to save it as a jpeg, then save it on to the C: drive.”
The next step is to hide all the icons and folders on the C: drive. “Clean off the entire desktop and place all the files and icons in a new folder, which will then be placed on the C: drive.”
And the final step is to locate your ‘Print Screen’ file and create the custom wallpaper which will resemble the original desktop.
If everything works as planned, your victim’s computer should look as if it has a full screen of icons and folders, the author continues. But, “As soon as your victim starts clicking on the wallpaper image, it will appear that the computer has locked up again!”
At ‘difficulty level 5’ is ‘broken keyboard’ – a practical joke aimed at ‘the co-worker who expresses too much cube rage’…
For hands-on fun if your office has space for the same!
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Cell processor
In 2001, Sony and Toshiba entered into a joint R&D relationship with IBM. It was for designing and manufacturing ‘what IBM called the Cell processor, a new multicore semiconductor processor to be used in IBM’s servers and mainframe computers,’ as Richard J. Elkus Jr narrates in ‘Winner Takes All: How competitiveness shapes the fate of nations’ (www.basicbooks.com). “In theory, the Cell process could be Asia’s answer to Intel and AMD,” the author describes.
Towards the end of 2006 debuted PlayStation3, with the Cell processor inside. It had 234 million transistors, and was several thousand times faster than the Control Data 7600. “The PS3 has the technological power of a supercomputer coupled with a Blu-ray high-definition video player and a hard drive at a tiny fraction of the cost one would have imagined only a few years ago.”
Elkus observes that it is Sony’s hope the Cell processor will be propagated across its entire product line, and also the PS3, powered by the Cell processor, will evolve into something far more than a game box, becoming a central computing facility for the home.
Japan being strong in consumer electronics, displays, and semiconductors, he anticipates that the Cell processor could become a key component in that country’s strategy for global competitiveness.
Recommended addition to the strategists’ shelf.
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Context versus core
Core is what differentiates your company to create sustainable competitive advantage, and context is everything else you do, says Geoffrey A. Moore in ‘Dealing with Darwin: How great companies innovate at every phase of their evolution’ (www.penguin.com).
Though managing context is where you spend the bulk of your time, your offers cannot earn the margins you need, if you do not create or renew core, Moore emphasises.
“Although context outweighs core by bulk volume, core outweighs context in terms of strategic importance.” If you perform context tasks badly, the market will punish you for not meeting its standards, but if you do them brilliantly, the market will give you no extra credit, the author distinguishes.
He explains through the example of the cell phone industry how the ‘core’ has ascended from subsidised cell phones to longer battery life to fashionable accessories to colour screens to SMS messaging to camera functionality to video games and downloads, with core becoming context over time.
To survive, it becomes necessary for firms to extract resources from context and repurpose core, advises Moore.
“The first step in managing context is to explicitly declare core.” Cisco, for instance, categorises its markets into four quadrants with core and context vertically, and mission-critical and non-mission-critical horizontally. India, Eastern Europe, China and Russia are in the mission-critical core quadrant, while Africa and Latin America are diagonally opposite, in the non-mission-critical context quadrant.
Extracting resources from context to repurpose for core is a collaborative effort, notes Moore. “Management must not succumb to the temptation to harvest the current skills of the workforce a bit longer, gaining a short-term productivity gain at the expense of long-term viability.”
The notions that companies should provide lifetime employment or that individuals should give lifetime loyalty are not consistent with the nature of modern economics or modern life, he adds. “What is consistent is to make better use of our collective creative intelligence to increase the returns on our mutual efforts and to share the rewards thereof equitably with all our stakeholders.”
Risky to delay a keen study, especially if you don’t want to turn into fossils prematurely.
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Tailpiece
“It was taking longer for the new recruits to settle down because we had to clear the cubicles of the predecessors’ leftovers...”
“So, you started clearing things faster?”
“Instead, we are now asking people to put their stuff in suitcases!”
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