Our paths to the outside world are many.
I just read a great post on Dealer Refresh about “Your Future Manager.” Here’s a quick excerpt:
Your future manager is a multi-tasking fiend. She or he will embrace every form of social media and communicate with staff by email or instant messenger. Technology use will be first and foremost on his or her mind, with an understanding that it doesn’t always work perfectly, but incorporating technology into processes is crucial. They will demand it!
It goes on to discuss how the younger generation (about age 30 and younger) has been bred into a multimedia cauldron – you may remember how “multimedia” was such a buzzword in the 90’s. Now it’s just a fact of life. Those of us from the “Connectedness Generation” are a breed apart from the past… the information age has infected us to a much greater degree.
Alex Snyder, the author of the article, describes his siblings and cousins and how all of them live lives wired (and now wireless) in so many different ways. It’s an experience that matches my own – as I type, I’m listening to the podcast of last night’s episode of Pardon the Interruption, keeping an eye on my Twitter and Facebook feeds on TweetDeck, and downloading last week’s episode of Lost, which I missed because it conflicts with two other shows I record on my DVR – Lie to Me and Mythbusters.
By my count, there are nine items in my house that are connected to the Internet, and that’s just for me – the dog is only seven months old and hasn’t figured out the Internet yet. And the truth is, to a large degree, Alex Snyder is exactly right. We should be looking for people with a talent and comfort level that makes them able to learn and adapt to new technologies and technological habits as they emerge.
