“Innovational” not a Generational Divide
TweetIt’s great to get back to some blogging. I’ve got about 10 major points that I want to post here – but its been a very busy two weeks – and its not even the end of a quarter!
I’m currently sitting on a two year post as a trustee of Stevens Institute of Technology which is my alma mater, and just one amazing university. The trustees had a two day meeting that co-incided with commencement at the university, and I had a lot of time to talk with my fellow trustees, and as I talked about my current position, and the challenges of selling FREE software, I was amazed at how quickly most of the people that I talked to just understood it.
One gentleman that I spoke to is probably in his late 70s or early 80s. Here was a man who sold his business and essentially retired from day to day work before companies had web sites – and he instantly understood (and already knew) all the concepts of Long Tail, and how technology has changed how we need to think about how to sell and pay for product. I was instantly able to chat with him about challenges and opportunities in motivating and driving a sales force focused on a free product.
Essentially every single person I spoke to over the past two days understood the mission of my company to provide free enterprise grade software and what that means in terms of my own challenges as a sales manager – and more importantly – the challenges of my salespeople as they go out and try to get people to accept this free product.
So this brings me to the main point of this short post. It was nice to see that there really isn’t a generational divide in terms of how things should or should not move forward. It is certainly an “innovational” divide. These very forward innovational people could clearly understand what the future was – and didn’t have any issue comprehending it.
