Here is a brief article written by Geoffrey Moore for LinkedIn Pulse. To check out a wealth of other resources and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

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Collaboration is the mode of work most privileged by the upcoming generation of digital infrastructure that is inherently social at its core. In this it stands in stark contrast to a prior focus on personal computing and digital tools to empower individual contributors. These two ideas are not contradictory, but there’s a generation gap operating here, and it is wider than it looks.

When my generation went to school (as those of us still alive will testify), collaboration was called cheating, and you were expelled for it. Every signal you got growing up—most specifically your grades—focused on you as an individual contributor. The great liberation in my era was from the oppressiveness of grades coming top down from a command-and-control bureaucracy to the freedom of a culture of customer satisfaction (that’s where the new grades came from) and individual accountability. Collaboration to achieve this outcome was OK, but there was always a lurking feeling that it might slow you down or dumb you down. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were our heroes: in short, we were nothing if not elitist.

Fast forward some number of decades, and now when you go to school, collaboration is called learning, and you are rewarded for it. Now the great liberation is from the oppressiveness of a competition culture, where the focus is on earning rewards that set you apart from your peers, to the freedom of a collaboration culture where you can all win together. Individual accountability in this context is still important, but there is a lurking concern that too much focus here will lead to loss of alignment which in turn will require either stopping to realign or resigning yourself to having less than a full impact.

The surge of power of behind collaboration culture is anchored in the vector math insight that it is the sum of all the vectors that matters, not each individual vector’s particular dimensions. In this context, a truly magnificent vector pointed in the wrong direction is a liability, not an asset. Conversely, a bunch of relatively ordinary vectors all aligned can kick your butt. It’s called teamwork.

So when you look at the current deployment of digital infrastructure, at all the texting and liking and uploading and sharing, it is good to realize how different it looks to someone depending on when they were born. To a baby boomer, frankly, it all too often looks like a big waste of time. To someone under the age of 30, this is how you get things done.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo!. He divides his time between consulting on strategy and transformation challenges with senior executives and speaking internationally on those same topics. His latest book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, keeps this intent in mind and is the result of his years of experience working with large enterprises.

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To read my two interviews of him, please click here.