Don Tapscott Re-invents Himself…Again

Like a chameleon, Don Tapscott has a gift that lets him adopt to a changing environment. During the dot-com boom, he was an e-commerce expert. When the bubble burst, he turned himself into a corporate governance guru who made transparency his mantra. Now, he's apparently a Web 2.0 expert judging from a promo for a speech he will give next week in Toronto where he will explain why Web 2.0 is “not same buzz surrounding another dot-com bubble. It's a whole new way of doing business online” at a time when “the Internet truly comes of age”. Don't get me wrong, I give Tapscott total credit for his ability to jump on the next high-tech trend even it means changing his stripes every few years. After all, Tapscott is a consulting, book writing and speech-giving machine who has a knack for knowing what people and companies want to hear – and doing it in an entertaining way. I went to a speech he gave several years ago just when the Blackberry and MP3 players were just moving into the mainstream. The audience just ate it up as if they were hearing about these developments for the first time. That's Tapscott gift: he consolidates a whole bunch of ideas, and then re-packages them in an informative and accessible way.