Further, I think its going to be a much slower generational hand off than many are assuming. Many 401k’s have been slaughtered in the last year putting off retirement, and we are getting much better at taking advantage of remote and part-time workers. I expect to see a lot of “semi-retirement” over the next 10 to 15 years.

Replacing everyone in a company with people familiar to the 2.0 tools will encourage adoption of those tools (or an expectation the tools will be there) – but the workplace culture or style of human interaction will actually drive your enterprise 2.0 mindset. Adopting a culture is actually the crux (because processes can be mandated from above and culture is something bigger than the boss).

If you have a culture where they all use Twitter for work but no one is really being upfront about the problems of the organization, you really haven’t changed much from the days of paper memos when they weren’t upfront about the problems of the organization. Likewise, if you have a transparent culture where people walk around and talk, and feel good about being there for customers – any translation to the forums or cell phone will continue this transparency.

Microsoft did well when it started blogging as a company because there was already a geek tradition around sharing technical info and the empowerment of being able to ask “why?” at Microsoft. We aren’t entirely populated by Gen Y people by any stretch…but we were ahead of much of the corporate world with blogging because that internal culture was there and ready for the tools. Blogging did not begin with an enteprise process because most folks did not know what a blog was before that. People just knew they wanted to communicate with customers.

Personally, I don’t know that there will be “an epic battle” of generations but I am sure the Gen Y startups of today begin with different assumptions than the early days of Microsoft or even the startups of the 90s. Older businesses will have to compete with these newer businesses and the allure of how they feel to work for. Gen Y employees will bring different strengths to the table and it will be fascinating to watch.

But I would say culture is still everything. How people interact with each other may include tools, or sets of processes, but the company’s culture will drive a lot.

I speak with many people who try to boil the whole thing down to an age issue. My quote and this post was a thought experiment attempting to articulate that there is far more going on than just a generational gap.

We lack experience. We have our own set of blinkers. We aren’t even _that_ good at harnessing the potential of Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 tools for business purposes.

I’d rather see a multi-generational workplace where we learn from the diversity of perspectives. =) I’ve written about how companies shouldn’t pin their Enterprise 2.0 hopes on Generation Y, and I firmly believe that only by getting people of all generations involved – not just Gen Yers – can we really figure out how to make the most of new tools and concepts.

Oliver Young blogged about this question , and here's the comment I left: That’s just wishful…

Social, er, community software needs to be as intuitive (if not more so) to Baby Boomers and GenXers as it would be to GenYers. It would be very foolish for any software vendor to assume that everyone will use tagging or blogging or vlogging or whatever it might be that’s “oh so popular w/ the MySpace/Facebook crowd.”

Yes, there is and will continue to be a generation gap, particularly in larger organizations. That gap will lead to some epic battles that I’m looking forward to being part of. Here are some good reads:

– Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War: http://enterprise2blog.com/2008/09/social-media-vs-knowledge-management-a-generational-war

– Millennials Reshaping Work With Social Computing Says Report: http://www.socialcomputingmagazine.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=626

– Business will be different in 5 years – fundamentally different: http://www.headshift.com/blog/2009/01/business-will-be-different-in.php

– Generation “Why”: http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/12/gene.html