A Baby Boomer complaint about younger generations that I have heard is that they are more interested in playing video games than doing work. All those hours playing video games gives them short attention spans.
Tell that to Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at MIT and cofounder of the gaming and learning research initiative, called The Education Arcade.
He was interviewed in Harvard Business Review this month and he had some interesting points to make about how growing up on video games will impact performance at work—but in positive ways. Gamers become good at making rapid decision based on limited information, which seems to be handy in our age of rapid information flow. “They can quickly reroute themselves and change their priorities as new problems arise, which is the style of decision making emerging in the contemporary workplace,” he posits.
This strikes me as an example of pursuing generational renewal as opposed to generational reaction. Simply take what is presented by the new generation and work to discover the strengths, rather than reject what is different simply because it is different.
