The Embedded Technology Generation

The leisure society was once a science fiction staple. These were stories built on a world in which production was so largely automated, and society was, as a consequence, so wealthy that most people lived comfortably on what amounted to but wasn’t called welfare.

Speaking arithmetically but not politically or macroeconomically, here in the U.S. of A., with an average annual per-household income that exceeds $110,000, we could live in this society whenever we chose.

And as a society we might need to start a serious conversation along these lines fairly soon. Why?

We’ve now reached pre-crash employment levels, but that’s the number of jobs.

While corporate profits are way beyond their 2007 levels, the annual compensation for your average job is much lower. The logical conclusion? Companies didn’t need many of the high-paid employees they laid off during the Great Recession in the first place.

You can be sure automation is an important reason, in spite of the suspicion common among business executives that left to its own devices, IT would spend on “technology for technology’s sake.”

IT never did spend on technology for technology’s sake, of course, although it did operate under the assumption that automating manual work made a company more efficient … an entirely reasonable assumption.

But accuse someone of something often enough and they’ll become timid and defenseless, so IT stopped actively looking for automation opportunities and instead actively participated in the establishment of increasingly elaborate governance mechanisms designed to prevent a problem that had never existed in the first place.

Enter Generation Whatever. Call them Millennials. Call them Recent Teenagers. Call them the Embedded Technology Generation (ETG).

Businesses are increasingly virtual. More and more employees have no employer-provided office. Taking my colleagues and myself in Dell Global Business Consulting as an example, we’ve all met fewer of each other face-to-face than otherwise, and yet we’re able to function in teams more or less on demand.

And none of us belong to the ETG, which means we’re somewhat less likely to use all the tools available to us to collaborate remotely, compared, that is, to employees who consider Facebook, Twitter and texting to be How People Share Ideas.

The ETG changes things. It’s time for aged managers to stop reading nonsensical articles about how, for “them,” it’s all about “me.” Of course it’s about me. This is capitalism — being all about me is a bedrock assumption, one that, in other contexts, business leaders celebrate.

It’s time for those of us in leadership roles who find ourselves geezing from time to time (you’re geezing when you criticize how others live their lives instead of enjoying your own) … where was I?

If you’re geezing too, here’s how to understand the difference between us and the ETG: your last rental car. Did you panic when you got behind the wheel, because the car’s user interface was different from the one you drive at home?

Of course not. You took a minute to orient yourself. You found the wipers, turn signals, headlight switch and so on, and whether you had to insert a key or just push the start button. And off you went.

That’s how the ETG thinks about technology. They don’t just figure it out — they expect to figure it out, and then they use Google to find possibilities they weren’t able to figure out for themselves.

I say “they” because I’m only about halfway there, and I say this with some regret.

Here’s what’s even more regrettable:

In more companies than not, information technology adroitness isn’t even considered important enough to be part of an employee’s performance appraisal. Sending documents to team members as attachments is, for example, considered just as acceptable as sending links to the central SharePoint copy, no matter how much more difficult it makes merging edits and new sections, and no matter how much chaos it creates in the form of everyone having to figure out which version is the current version.

The thought of authoring a project deliverable as a wiki? What’s a wiki? Of creating a client presentation with Prezi instead of PowerPoint? Uh uh. Prezi isn’t company-standard software, and besides, what’s Prezi?

Astonishingly, in many companies, it wouldn’t occur to someone who doesn’t know the answer to Google it to find out.

Meanwhile, the ETG would have installed it at home and figured it out, because that’s what you do with interesting technology.

If corporations are people too, maybe they should start to think this way, too.

It’s time for corporate America to join the ETG.