Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

HR writer Sarah McAdams reviews the book Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott.

There are a handful of reasons to read Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World HC. Among them:

1) You don’t “get” the youngest workers at your organization;

2) You think Millennials (the hipper, more “preferred” term for Generation Y) — those born between 1977 and 1998 — are rotting their brains with their nonstop Internet and video game use; and

3) You think there are a few other rotten things associated with that generation—like their sense of entitlement, lack of respect for elders and poor work ethic.

Don Tapscott’s book is based on a $4 million study funded by large corporations and conducted by his research company nGenera Innovation Network. There is some interesting research indicating that this generation should not be reviled and instead celebrated as its members are revolutionizing every aspect of how society thinks, works and interacts.

Perhaps, as he writes, “the Net Gen norms I describe in this book may turn out to be the key indicators of high-performing organizations in the twenty-first century.”

I found three areas of data particularly interesting: how Millennial individuals’ brains develop — tens of thousands of hours of video games and Internet use before age 20 apparently has positive effect on things like the processing of visual information, hand-eye coordination, and multitasking; how to parent these individuals; and how they’re using the Internet to transform the political process.

But as a business book — i.e., how to attract, retain, and work with this generation — there didn’t seem to be much new information (at least to those of us not hiding under a rock for the past year — or hiding from any major news outlet, anyway). They like work-life balance, freedom, collaboration, social consciousness, being engaged, immediacy, customization, etc., etc.

In fact, at times, the book seems to be largely an emotional response to Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future(Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)—which Tapscott criticizes at length.

Adding to that sense is the fact that Tapscott (also author, among others, of the bestseller Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything) has two millennial children himself — whose actions and activities are referenced and revered dozens of times throughout the book (making it seem at times less a definitive scholarly work, and more a personal, anecdotal tale).

Nonetheless, for HR pros, chapter six is most relevant: “Rethinking Talent and Management: The Net Generation in the Workforce.” Most of this section is dedicated to providing statistics and anecdotes explaining what this generation wants out of work (freedom, collaboration, balance, and so on) — what Tapscott calls the eight norms of Net Gen.

But there is also some interesting commentary about how companies have no choice but to rethink the way they do business in light of this generation — including everything from collaboration and knowledge management, to recruiting by initiating relationships via social networks, to maintaining those relationships when an employees leaves.

In general, while the conversational tone and informal format make the book an easy read, the cheerleading of this generation as the best thing since, well, the Greatest Generation, is a bit harder to swallow. The more than 11,000 young people Tapscott interviewed and about whom he wrote fit into a fairly narrow demographic — which is North American, well educated and fairly well off. And, as the book came out just before the economic recession hit, there isn’t discussion of how this generation — one that the author repeatedly touts as being all about choices — will fare in the era of increasingly narrow employment choices.

Regardless, I buy Tapscott’s conclusion that millennials are not being given enough credit. It’s hard, after all, to disagree with this assertion:

As the Net Generation grows in influence, the trend will be toward networks, not hierarchies, toward open collaboration rather than command, toward consensus rather than arbitrary rule, and toward enablement rather than control. As students, children and consumers, they are pressuring schools, families, and markets to change. As knowledge workers, educators, government leaders, entrepreneurs, and customers, they will be an unstoppable force for transformation.

Sarah McAdams writes the popular “Balancing Act” and “Office Watch” columns for HR Insight. Sarah has reported on human resources for a variety of publications, including the Journal of Employee Communication Management, Corporate Legal Times and The Ragan Report. She has written about many other subjects for publications like the Chicago Tribune, Montreal Gazette, Orlando Sentinel, Self magazine and Daily Variety. McAdams also helped ghostwrite the book Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion After 50 by David D. Corbett (Jossey-Bass, 2007).