This past Wednesday was my son’s 20th birthday. His first two decades of life have been remarkably different than mine were. I grew-up analog, he grew-up digital. To appreciate and understand my son and his friends, I relied on the baby boomer’s essential field guides for understanding the Net Generation; the 1999 book Growing UP Digital; followed by the 2008 sequel Grown Up Digital; both written by Don Tapscott.
Coincidentally, Wednesday also saw the arrival of Anywhere: How Global Connectivity Is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business; the new book by Yankee Group CEO Emily Nagle Green. The forward by Don Tapscott begins by saying “The Internet has finally come of age.”We learned from Tapscott how the Net Generation spent their childhood. Anywhere describes the digital world these young adults have inherited, and offers a roadmap for how they will exploit digital connectivity to create a better world.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Emily Nagle Green several times. As the CEO of Yankee Group, she travels the world, interviewing thought leaders in the communications industry. She weaves insight from these leaders into a compelling argument that the Anywhere Revolution has just begun. The forces driving the revolution: a common digital network, broadband demand, and wireless ubiquity are nearing a tipping point. Once it tips, global connectivity will create tens of trillions of dollars in economic value between now and 2020. In the developed world, the way we work and play will be transformed, every industry will be impacted, leaving disruption in its wake as new companies emerge while others fail to transform themselves. In the developing world, connectivity will help break the cycle of inefficiency, corruption, and exploitation, lifting billions of people out of poverty.
More than just painting a vision, Anywhere offers managers a practical assessment called; How anywhere do you need to be, as well as a roadmap for getting there.There is also a chapter on the hurdles such as spectrum reform, bandwidth bottlenecks, and the availability of electrical power.
That grand vision is tempered with the humility that even the industry thought leaders don’t understand all the ramifications.According to Mike Muller, of chip maker ARM; “We can anticipate pretty well what technology will be available in the future; we’re less good at predicting what people will do with it.” Sentiments echoed by one of the icons of the telecom industry, Ben Verwaayen CEO of Alcatel-Lucent “as an industry we’re not a reliable source for knowing what people’s behavior will be.We’ve gotten it wrong many times.” So even the industry leaders admit, they can’t always predict people’s behavior. Good thing SAS will be there to help with predictive analytics.
I was out of college before any adult ever paid me for something requiring a good education.Before that I bagged groceries, mowed lawns, and did maintenance work at the local Caterpillar dealer.Last week I used the Apple App store to buy an application written by the son of a friend.I paid 99 cents for his app, and he’s making several hundred dollars a week. I’d recommend Anywhere to all baby boomers. Many of us are going to be working for these kids one day, we might as well understand them and the world they will be creating.
