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| Original table appears in the Harvard Business Review Blog |
How clearly one sees the divide between Old and New professional behavior might be a function of one's age and experience. In my personal case, as a field grade Army officer, I am positioned between the younger company grade Captains and the more senior General Officers. In my observation, junior officers uniformly exhibit the New Professional ethic. What is interesting to me is that the Army is so resilient and so adaptable, that the majority of General Officers are also embracing social media. The Chief of Staff of the Army, GEN Ray Odierno, tweets on Twitter and posts on Facebook.
Where I see a rub is in some of the old-school field grade officers, who mistrust social media--and often fer very good reason! They prefer secure email for a private, auditable record of communication. I get that. With all of the privacy concerns surrounding unwelcome advertisements via data hounds supporting Facebook and Google, I certainly get that.
My perspective as a career Army officer is one dimension of the professional divide. I am also a family man, so I think a personal divide applies. I am a Dad to two teen-aged daughters, with whom my primary means of communication is the sound-bite of an SMS text message: the kind one must delete daily to prevent one's phone from "clogging up." How impersonal and remote that feels to me! At the same time. I have parents who prefer phone calls, so I call my folks who never text and text my kids who never call, and spend the rest of my time in the in-between.
If you follow that generational communication trajectory I just laid out, where does it lead? What does it portend for our country, our economy, our families--our world?
I have no clear predictions to offer but my thought is this: I aim to remain relevant. I see the decision to stop at least trying to keep up as akin to death. Everything living changes.
Please read Allison Fine's excellent blog post HERE
H/T: Scott over at Nestler Analytics.
I can relate to how you communicate with your family. My son and I communicate through text messages and my parents by weekly phone conversations. My son is 23 and has had two internships and both of them were as a media coordinator. He updated facebook pages and twittered for a US Congressman and for the Rural Initiatives Institute. His degree is in Political Science and now in grad school for Regional and Community Planning....not twittering and facebook but it shows the need for our next generation to use what they know to help our generation connect with the up and coming professional. Even the Dalai Lama has someone twitter for him! I miss a hand written letter from a relative or an old friend in their own handwriting and I miss hearing the voice of the same. I recently lowered the minutes I use on my cell phone due to lack of use and increased my text message usage to unlimited. I wonder if at some point when a phone call or a handwritten letter will cease to exist and a new generation will think they have invented something by starting it up again! That's my two cents!
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