My peers are finally beginning to wake up to their kids’ technologies - including blogs, wikis and podcasts, as well as up- and downloadable videos - and how they can be applied to improve business performance according to this week’s issue of Businessweek. And it couldn’t have come any sooner for my company and yours.

We have all known that our rolodex (who we knew) was invaluable. It helped us find new jobs, make sales, compare notes and gain trusted feedback. And the same was true for our knowledge (what we knew). These two capabilities together formed the foundation of our ability to climb the corporate ladder and support our families. And we invested a lot and time and effort in these intangible 'assets', even if we used older technologies like conference calls or in-person meetings and classes to to do it. Now, Businessweek and many other publications including the New York Times , tells us that today’s Web 2.0 tools can add fuel to our personal and professional engines of growth. In short, these technologies can dramatically expand ‘who we know’ (linkedin) and ‘what we know’ (wikipedia) on a direct and low cost basis (jotspot). And leading companies continue to experiment with and gain success with them (Boeing and Chrevron).

The lessons learned are simple: to insure our near and long term success, we must all accept and embrace our kids’ tools – blogs, wikis and social networking technologies – as enterprise requirements. And I am all for that. Now, the only thing I worry about is today’s kids. I think they really enjoyed the fact that their parents – leaders of great enterprises and investment organizations – did not understand ‘what's up' with these tools and why their kids found them so completely engrossing. But as the people in my organization, as well as our corporate customers, become increasingly familiar with Web 2.0, they are finding a new found reality: An ability to learn something really valuable from their kids and how to apply these capabilities to their business to improve their personal and professional productivity. In short, they are becoming part of the myspace and facebook generation. What a wonderful, and upside down, world we live in where our kids are leading businesses into the promised world. - Barry 6/12/06