Talking Talent

Is the next Galileo sitting at home wasting his potential watching DVDs of Star Wars instead of watching the stars themselves?  Is the next Shakespeare tapping out love texts on her mobile phone instead of writing the next Romeo and Juliet?

Luddites and techno-phobes complain that digital technologies are stifling creativity and creating a generation of unmotivated couch potatoes.

Technology has undoubtedly made life much easier for so many - but that doesn’t mean we’ve become lazy.  Instead, technology has further enabled us to expand our infinite creative potential.

The Internet has given people a means to break down barriers that once muffled the flow of information and collaboration.  With people from across the globe now able to access seemingly infinite amounts of information and to be able to collaborate and share ideas, we are entering an exciting new era.

With blogs and wikis, everyone can communicate.  With RSS feeds, everyone can read about it.  MySpace, Ning, Bebo and FaceBook help us to connect with the world. Flickr helps to sort, store and share your snaps, while YouTube let’s you show off your movie making talents.  Tagging sites like Del.ici.ous enable us to share our favourite webpages.  Gliffy provides the tools to draw and share diagrams, Googledocs eliminates the challenges of document version control, while Slideshare hosts and shares presentations.  The list is endless.

And despite what the naysayers say, Internet technologies are not making us lazier, but instead have the capacity to deliver sharp upswings in productivity.

While MySpace might seem like fun and fluff, social networks, teleconferencing, wikis and other technologies that allow interaction on a large scale are changing traditional business models and improving productivity.

Cisco Systems’ Chairman, John Chambers, recently suggested that businesses that embrace collaborative communications models, such as social networking, into their processes could see a return to 3 to 5 percent annual improvements in worker productivity.

By allowing people both in and outside of companies to connect with each other, and share information over the network, the pace of business operations will escalate.  The power of connecting will enable us to do things at a dramatically different speed.

So, in the words of science fiction writer, Robert A Heinlein, “progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”