'Great minds' thinking alike

During a very interesting discussion with Nick Chapman of Thrupeople this week, the topic of young graduate entrants to companies came up. Nick agreed with me that this group is significant when it comes to take-up of Enterprise 2.0. We found ourselves agreeing that the culture of many organisations is in all probability incompatible with the expectations of this group. We kicked around some ideas for addressing the issue with a social networking approach. Nick suggested I might do some research among a sample of graduates to see what those expectations and aspirations might actually be. I might well do so, especially since I missed this ITT.

After the meeting with Nick, having already formed the view that there were a number of minds, great or otherwise, thinking alike on this topic, I picked up the March 2007 issue of Information Age, and read this:

...a generation of IT-savvy graduates - all of whom have whiled away their university years in 'chat rooms' and on social networking sites - now entering the workforce. "This generation has different values from the baby-boomers...tending to be more transparent, willing to share information, used to getting things more immediately, and wanting to interact quickly."

Increasingly, employers have had to become receptive to to the expectations of what Forrester Research has dubbed the 'Millenials' - those born between 1980 and 2000 - making collaboration a key recruitment issue....For many of these people, going into a company which says, 'No, we do it this way', is going to seem really antiquated...

Do you get the impression, as I do, that we have a strong driver for social software take-up here, and possibly for organisational culture change? Could such changes be a prerequisite for attracting the younger generation into the workforce, and a real differentiator between successful and unsuccessful organisations?