21st Century Management with Don Tapscott

We were honored to have Don Tapscott – author of the best-selling book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and most recently, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World -  as our guest for the Rypple Leadership Webinar Series this past week.

He opened with a very bold statement:

I am convinced that we are in a time of very profound change, with huge implications for every manager and everyone who thinks of human capital.

Don talked for a few minutes on what’s going on in our world and what has led up to this extreme change that he is talking about. He then moved to talk about all of the many institutions that have been affected by this shift in the world and narrowed in on one particularly important topic – work.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Dilbert sums up the old industrial model of work. While the old model of work may have been fine for the industrial age  it’s not fine for the new age.

What I would like to argue to you is that everything that we know about talent management is wrong.

2. Work and learning are the same thing. Rather than recruiting, build a relationship. You should not retain people, we need to engage people life long.

Rather than recruitment, let’s initiate and develop relationships

3. Reshape the experience. All the old ways are out, new standards have been set. The new resume, the new qualifications,  social media experience is wanted for most jobs now!

Work = collaboration = learning = fun. They are all the same thing!

4. New collaborative models. Now that we have collaboration that can occur on an astronomical scale is changing everything. Collaboration to achieve a work/life balance.

5. Meaning is the new money. Money is now #4 on the list of what’s important to young professionals:

1. Learning
2. Interesting People
3. Fun
4. Money

6. Continuous feedback is critical.

We need to move away from batch performance management to ongoing performance management. We now have all these tools of collaboration that should be used to strengthen a team and work and relationships.

Build a network model of talent and the whole challenge of retention is very different.

Don ended his inspiring talk with these key conclusions:

This is a big change, don’t go back to 1982 or even to The Great Depression to try and get a similar transformation. These institutions in the industrial economy are stalled and they are running out of gas, and we can rebuild these institutions around a whole new networked model. I’m actually very optimistic about the future because in every one of these institutions  there are these wonderful new initiatives on the way….

… If you free yourself from that old model, you can imagine a set of institutions or a new age of networked intelligence that are appropriate for the 21st century and that are enabled by a new communications medium and that are being driven by a new generation of digital natives.

He then proceeded to answer some awesome questions. The full recording of the webinar is posted below or to view the slides and learn more, you can check out our webinar page.