I would not dispute Brian’s central point that “purpose drives innovation”and that technology companies in general and Silicon Valley in particular have been the locus of some very fascinating social developments. I would question, however, whether the “energy and might of talented teams” in practice reflects the diversity of viewpoints that Brian sees. In particular, “talent” seems to be pretty much synonymous with youth. The chances of one of these talented teams including anyone over the age of 40 are pretty much nil.

There are in fact a fair number of us older folks who know a good deal about these issues. I’ve been studying and writing about issues of innovation and technological change for over 40 years now, since as a graduate student I had the privilege of working with the late Dr. Everett Rogers, coiner of the term “diffusion of innovations”and one of its earliest scholars. At the National Science Foundation in the early 1980s, I arranged for the funding of the very first empirical research studies done on the impacts of personal computing on office work — over, I might note, the major objections of senior managers at NSF who told me that personal computing was a “very narrow technology”, unlikely to have any significant impact on organizations apart from a few technical areas. I still have quite a lot of ideas relevant to the concerns that Brian is raising your about the intersection of innovation and organization. Yet the idea gulf is sufficiently broad and deep enough that the chances of my ever interacting with the kinds of people Brian considers to be the wave of his future are exceedingly slim.

This isn’t some sort of extended whine about “the younger generation” and how “nobody listens to us old folks”. That’s kind of a built-in feature of our society and hardly worth commenting on. It is a suggestion that the issues Brian identifies here are not brand-new, and in fact there’s been a great deal of thinking about them over the last 40 to 50 years. It would be nice to see that there is some sort of continuity between the work being done now and the work done in previous years that laid the foundation for today’s efforts. There’s no question that age makes us increasingly invisible in the world of work, but it does not necessarily invalidate our analyses or contributions.