On the Road

Getting an idea off the ground is like quitting a vice, or starting a new healthy regimen, if you can commit to three days, it becomes habit....ya right. Keeping that age old rule of thumb in mind, today is officially the third day of the Google Search for Zen, a venture in understanding today’s social arena, and then getting tomorrow’s tools, into yesterday's leaders hands. Still following...?

After putting down Thomas L. Friedman's "The World is Flat", Flipping through Don Tapscott's Wikinomics, and throwing Roger Martin's "Integrative Thinking" somewhere between the couch and the wall, I slowly realized that in order to bridge the gap between today’s integrated tools and technophobes, I was starting in the wrong place. While the lessons and stories in each of these books are truly groundbreaking, they are not where I begin, but maybe revisit at a later stage.

Taking a shower with CSNY playing in the background, it started to hit me. Boomers and traditionalists do NOT need to be taught social networking, they just need a little push in the right direction with today's E-quipment. Hell, they're the greatest social networkers of all time. They turned a couple of posters, and some word of mouth into arguably the greatest social networking event of all time - Woodstock. They're the originators of the protest movement, the sit in, international human rights movements and the explosion of sport en masse - All prime examples of social networking. And all this without a twitter, a facebook, a BBM, an email...wait..wait, without a Cell Phone. So you give the basic knowhow in their hands, who do you think can use today's social networking tools more importantly, the average person who grew up in the late 60's, having raised a family, become financially independent, pursued a career and believed in something, or your average 17.5 year old girl/guy whose latest facebook post involves a fused funnel and tube to drink out of.

So I'm starting with the strengths of boomers, not the weaknesses where I began and building out from there. Their inherent ability to network, their acquired wisdom, and their patience. Those are things I can work with, and qualities that today's tools have weakened among gen Y'rs, including myself, so if you'll excuse me, I just concentrated for about 5 min longer than is healthy.

Boom. D

Intresting site i stumbled on re: social networking based solutions:
http://www.hunch.com/ - why make decisions when a formula based website can do it for you.