CIOs these days are constantly pressured--by analysts, consultants, vendors and sundry other prognosticators--to indulge the ways of Generation Y. The underlying threat always seems to be something along the lines of, "If you don't let them use iPhones, iPads, Facebook and YouTube at the office, they won't work for you." While executives have always dealt with new ideas and behaviors from the up-and-coming generation, the gap seems far greater than ever before, and the pressure on management to appease the desires of younger employees is intense.

For some insight into the gap and what is driving the wedge, it might be useful to take a look at the No. 1 movie at the box office: "The Social Network." A fictionalized story about the founding of Facebook and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, the movie earned an estimated $23 million in its opening weekend. I have not seen it yet myself, but the reported audience reaction alone is revealing. The film "could well serve as a referendum on business aggression and ambition that breaks along generational lines," wrote The New York Times' David Carr.

"As the characters around him chatter and amble about, Mr. Zuckerberg is often seen looking away, into a future that only he can see. And when people don't come around to that vision, he runs them over or blows past them," Carr wrote, adding that "with a face pinched into prickliness and a tendency to staple people with his mouth, he was clearly no picnic to be around."

Nick Denton, founder of the website Gawker, is quoted saying that much of the film "seemed to be about the virtues of stubbornness, about not listening to what was said by others around you." Jesse Eisenberg, who played Zuckerberg, said the message of the movie is "that technology allows you to create something that can change things from a single computer. You don't need a secretary, you don't need an office building and you don't need employees."

Evidently, people of an older generation than Zuckerberg tend to view the film as a cautionary tale of betrayal and the desire to succeed at any cost. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg's contemporaries--he's 26--tend to see the movie in a more positive light, even viewing the Facebook creator in heroic terms. "I was asked by older people again and again how I could play a character who is capable of being so mean, as if I were almost condemned by this role," Eisenberg said. "But young people never had that reaction. They kept saying, 'This guy was a genius. Look what he has created.'"

Stubbornness, refusal to listen and disregard for anyone but oneself may have worked for Zuckerberg (or may not have worked, since the movie is fiction). But companies that still rely on teams of people probably don't want to encourage these attributes or indulge the whims of employees who admire them. - Caron