Don Tapscott
Author, Business Strategist and Chairman, nGenera Insight
Appearing at BIF-6
The Visionary Humanist
by Christine Flanagan
Technology, in all its many forms and facets has been Don Tapscott’s life’s work. Once identified by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore as “a world leading cyber guru,” he’s spent the last 30 years as author, teacher, researcher, and management consultant envisioning the technological convergence of computing, communications and content.
Tapscott, who brought the term “paradigm shift” into the vernacular in 1991 with his landmark book published under the same name, says that we are in the midst of another paradigm shift with profound changes taking place in the deep architecture and modus operandi of just about every institution in society.
From the corporation and the way we orchestrate capabilities to innovate, to our in flux financial system, to a collapsing media industry, to outdated university structures, healthcare systems and energy grids, “the viability of how we’re placed on this planet is now being called into question,” he says. “We have 40 years to reindustrialize the Earth.”
Yet a doomsayer Tapcott is not. He’s just lived and studied too many paradigm shifts to say otherwise.
Tapscott began his career in 1977 arriving in Toronto fresh off receiving his master’s degree in research methodology. He landed a “dream job” position as Manager of the Future Group at Bell Northern Research and spent 3 months traveling the world with an unlimited budget talking to everyone who knew anything about computers and how they might change the world.” He ended at the doorstep of Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute.
Described by Tapscott as the “father of just about everything digital,” Englebart wrote a landmark paper in 1962 called ‘Augmenting Human Intellect,’ which outlined a conceptual framework for how technology, especially computers, would provide answers to dealing with an ever more complex modern world.
“Englebart was remarkable. He dedicated his life to the pursuit of developing technologies that would expand our intellectual capacity. He wrote about things that we’re only now starting to realize. I came back from that meeting with the view that computers would ultimately change every institution in society,” says Tapscott.
After three years at Bell Northern—“it’s funny to think that everyone back then said professionals and managers would never learn to use a keyboard”—Tapscott left to pursue other interests. He founded and sold a few successful companies and wrote thirteen books, including the best sellers The Digital Economy, Growing up Digital, The Naked Corporation, Wikinomics and most recently, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World.
His next book is modestly titled ‘Rebuilding the World’ and takes off where Wikinomics ended. “The same forces that are causing corporations to change are now forcing other institutions to do the same. It’s not just wikinomics; it’s a wikiworld,” Tapscott observes.
Tapscott says many of the ideas he’s been advancing over the years were ideas in waiting; waiting for a new web, waiting for a new generation of young people for whom the use of technology is second nature - like the air we breath. “We have a new medium of social technologies that are enabling us to do everything differently and better. It’s more than just communication – it’s self-organization and this is leading to profound changes.”
But there’s something else. Tapscott says he’s convinced this recessionary period will not end with a return to the same old way of doing things. Systems eventually fail because “they’ve taken us to a certain point in history and can go no further.”
“There’s been a convulsive shock to the system that’s creating this burning platform in all of our institutions,” he says. “This is it. This is happening now.”
“Just look at the financial services industry,” he explains. “It’s not a matter of simply injecting capital or enforcing new regulations; it needs a whole new operating model — one based on transparency, sharing of intellectual property and global governance.”
Despite the realities of the situation, Tapscott remains hopeful about the opportunities that lay ahead. “We have a new medium of communications where we can reorganize all these institutions on a new set of principles,” he explains. “A new set of fundamental values and ways of operating must be applied. Innovation is one of them. Collaboration, integrity, interdependency, sustainability, openness - these are the kinds of principles upon which we need to rebuild the world.”
“This is a punctuation point in human history and my life’s work has come together around it.”
