James Franklin: You just touched on a very hot button, not only for IT organizations, but what we we're seeing in business as the next generation of workforce comes into play. The concept of consumerization, or Web 2.0, new technologies, new ways of thinking about technology and how we use it in our consumer world is spilling over into companies. Like social media, phone devices, and a number of other things. How are you seeing those trends impact both the workforce, the expectation of the workforce which is very different today, and how those expectations of the workforce impact IT? They are coming in and expecting these things, they are already trained on the technology, in many cases they know the technology even better than some of the people in the IT organizations. How are you seeing those workforce dynamics, and some of those things that we have access to outside the company, impacting how companies and workforces are evolving today?

Gary Hamel: That’s a big question, and a hugely important one today. Let me start with an observation. If you think about the way most of our companies are run internally, if I can say the management architecture, not the IT architecture, the management architecture is kind of a center-to-end architecture. If I had an IT analogy, it’s the way a big telephone switch used to work, where all of the intelligence was in the central switch, if you want to add a new feature you reprogram the switch. If you think about the web, which by the way is far more adaptable and innovative and engaging than any organization is, the web already has all these qualities we have to build in our organizations. If you think about the web, it’s built on an end-to-end architecture. It's mostly periphery and very little center, and I think that’s a very interesting kind of metaphor today because I would argue one of the reasons I think that companies often have a very difficult time adapting is that in companies we still have a lot of centralization, not just operationally, but if you think about most companies, who really controls the conversation over strategy and direction and where we go next tends to be a small group at the top.

We know from years and years of studying social systems that the more centralized something is, the less adaptable it is. So the web is going to teach us a huge number of very, very important lessons about how to build something that is truly adaptable, and can change, and exploits all of this collective imagination and wisdom. You are absolutely right that this next generation of folks coming to work - those of us who have a little bit of gray hair, for us the web is a tool - for them it’s the operating system for their lives. The experience of growing up on the web has shaped them in ways that will be true for the rest of their lives, they are never going to surrender certain sets of beliefs. So, for example, if you are growing up on the web you believe that every idea should compete on an equal footing and no idea should get a free pass because it comes from a SDP or an EVP or whatever. Let the ideas compete, let's have some kind of a peer review process, and let's see what ideas are really good. They want to work in organizations where that’s true.

Number two, they believe that what should matter is your contribution, not your credentials. When you post something to You Tube or you put something up on a blog, no one says, did you go to film school or did you go to journalism school? It's, was it funny? Was it good? And they expect the same thing. Give me a chance, judge me on what I do, not what school I came from, not the last job I had, and so on.

One more example, third and very critically, it's interesting if you think about the web, there are kinds of hierarchies on the web. If you go to any discussion forum, there are some people that have a bigger share of the voice and have more influence and more posts. You go to Amazon and there's the top reviewers and so on. But if you think of all those hierarchies on the web, they are all built bottom up. Jeff Bezos, Amazon, doesn’t come and say you are the new top reviewer at Amazon. So I think when people are coming to work now they want to see organizations where the hierarchies are really built more bottom-up, and the people of leadership positions are there because people actually want to follow them, rather than somebody said you are the leader.

So I have a sense that this next generation is really going to want to work in organizations where the internal social reality mirrors the social reality of the web, and that’s not going to happen all at once or overnight. But if it's not happening at all or happening real slowly, I think a company is going to have a really hard time in attracting the best and the brightest.