Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

When I was growing up in the late 60’s early 70’s, there was an adage: “Never trust anyone over 30.”

Today, I’m seeing the same group of people say “Never trust anyone under 30.”

We might not be saying it directly, but we’re certainly implying it with the fear and loathing of collaborative tools - like RSS-enabled collaboration platforms, blogs and IM - at our employees’ disposal.

In an Internetweek article covering the Office 2.0 conference last week, I was sorry to read of the following exchange among panelists:

“David Meyer of BEA, said his company’s recently launched AquaLogic Ensemble provides IT with a layer of control on top of applications like wikis, managing who can access them. “It allows the culture of participation within boundaries,” said Meyer. (my emphasis - JLJ)

But there are also cultural and generational issues that will probably require more than a technology solution.

“I hear it every week, someone saying ‘You can’t [post] that because they think it’s going to undercut their authority,” said Meyer. Schueller of P&G agreed.

“There is a generation and expectation gap,” he said. “You talk to someone whose been successful in one operating paradigm who says ‘How do I limit this information to the people who need to know’ versus someone who can’t wait to tell everyone what they just did.”

My answer to Mr. Shueller? Trust them.

Trust is almost a foreign concept to those of us who’ve been in the work world for 20 years or more. But it certainly has been tested in the past ten years - which are arguably the most formative years of our work history for people of my generation.

While many of us watched our fathers (yes, mostly our fathers) work for 30+ years at the same company while we were growing up; we quickly figured out that our lives would be very different.

Especially those of us who got into less traditional businesses early on - technology, telecom, software, energy trading and such.

We’re the ones who are now running organizations who:

• don’t provide retirement support
• have self-insurance policies in force
• consider bagels on Thursdays as a big benefit to our employees

In a truly inspired post on trust for virtual teams, Anne Truitt Zelenka actually has the audacity to prescribe collaboration tools to help build trust among knowledge workers!

I’m with Anne.

Since our inability to trust is deep seeded, we’ve got to look at tools like Attensa’s enterprise RSS platform, Kapow Technology’s mashup platform and Lotus’ Sametime to enable our employees to facilitate trust in each other where we cannot.

Limiting information, after all, flies in the face of the values we held growing up in the 60’s and 70’s…

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