Old white guys in corporate Canada need help from digital natives
Maybe what’s needed is an Internet Whisperer
CALGARY, AB, Mar. 7, 2012, Troy Media – Sometimes it feels like my job is to make old white guys comfortable with the Internet. Apparently I am the Internet whisperer. Or maybe the baby boomer whisperer, I’m not sure. As a boomer myself. it probably makes sense.
It’s a statistical reality that corporate Canada is largely run by white male baby boomers. Ann Golden, President and CEO of the Conference Board of Canada, noted in a 2011 Canadian Board Diversity Council report…
Diverse groups continue to be significantly under-represented on Canadian boards of directors. Non-profit boards are making better progress in adding women compared to corporate boards, but both could do much more to include more individuals who are visible minorities, Aboriginal peoples or have disabilities.”
Boomers run Canada's oilsands (photo credit Dean Bicknell, Calgary Herald)
Time to pay attention
I’m an anomaly for my generation. Old white guys are generally not at all digital, a fact they freely admit, often with pride. I recently heard tell of a very senior oil and gas executive who asked an employee “What’s Gmail?”
Seriously? Only half the planet is on Gmail, I mean, what does it take to get your attention?
OK, so you’re busy running a multi-billion dollar company, but puh-leeze, get some digital help.
Happily, there is a convenient solution. We should stop asking old white cats to bark like dogs – it’s not in their nature. Instead, we need the old dudes to give the green light to digital natives to run tightly controlled well-managed pilot projects and report back from these foreign digital lands.
The problem is, digital natives don’t speak “corporate-ese” – they can’t make the business case to convince executives to sponsor their forays onto the social web. To millenials it’s self-evident; of course we should be there! Wrong, says the leadership team, and round and round they go, barely catching a whiff of the web. IT chimes in with the security bogeyman and it’s game over.
Unless someone comes in as the “universal translator”, bridging the gap between the generations and leading boomers “boldly where no man has gone before” – to the social web.
Wanted: Internet Whisperer
Social media should be controlled in a corporate setting, no doubt about it. It should show returns, in the form of outcomes, not silly metrics like followers. Risks should be mitigated and security should be addressed – all good.
But what’s really needed to get things started is an executive sponsor, someone who guides a junior employee through the corporate decision-making gauntlet, and facilitates the consensus building process. A youngster needs a mentor who believes in their digital sophistication.
And sometimes it helps to have a boomer whisperer nearby to make the business case and line up the pitch.
Those boomers are digitally skittish, after all.
Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto. Find him on Twitter at @dblacombe.
About Doug Lacombe
As president of social media agency communicatto, Doug is a social media speaker, strategist and consultant. A 20 year media and marketing veteran, Doug was one of the first in North America to put a daily newspaper on the web in 1995. Prior to founding communicatto inc. in 2009, he held senior roles in the newspaper, software, wireless, and newswire industries. Speaking and working all over North America, Doug is based in beautiful Calgary, Alberta Canada where he lives with his wife of 24 years, Sandra, and a spoiled Mexican rescue dog named Bug.
Tags: Ann Golden, baby boom, baby boomers, boomers, business, Conference Board of Canada, corporate, digital, digital natives, executives, Gmail, Internet, internet whisperer, leadership, Social Media, social web
