What is New in Tom Friedman’s New Book?
Tom Friedman is, after all, keeping his promise. The World is Flat [Updated and Expanded] is all set to release on Tuesday, April 18, or “in the spring of 2006”, as he had promised. Friedman has been talking about the updated version in public for quite some time.
Let us try to peep into it, based on whatever he has revealed so far, based on two major sources: Tom Friedman’s own speech that he delivered in the annual conference of Indian IT services association, NASSCOM, in February 2006, where this writer was in the audience; and an extremely good interview that he gave to The Financial Times Finance Editor Andrew Hill in November 2005, in the in the wake of The World is Flat winning the FT-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award.
One phrase that he has been talking about most is “The new middle”. The book is likely to dwell at some length on this.
I’m here at EDS in Dallas because what I’m focused on right now is trying to understand who is going to be in “the new middle class”. In the flat world, as I say in the book, everyone wants to be an “untouchable” – someone whose job cannot be outsourced. In the book I talk about two categories of untouchables. The people who are specialists – Michael Jordan, Madonna, your cardiac surgeon: they’re not going to be outsourced or automated. Then there are people who are really localized – your dentist, the guy who collects the garbage, the nurse at the clinic, the chef, the waiter. They’re also not going to be outsourced. But in between are more and more jobs that are either going to be subject to some degree, if not in totality, to automation and outsourcing. Those were the jobs of the middle class. They were both blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs. So the question I’m asking myself now – which is implicit in this edition of the book and which I’m going to drive even more in the next – is What will be the new middle? Who will be the new middle class, what will be the new middle class jobs in a flat world? What I’m doing is working backwards. So I come to EDS and I say, “Who are you hiring, who has jobs here?” I look at all these people with jobs and ask “Who are these people, what do they do?” Then I work backwards and go to universities and say: “To what extent are you changing your curriculum and education to train people for these jobs of the new middle?” That’s where the first group I talk about – people worried about education – meet the business side.
Expect a lot of new phrases and examples around this idea of new middle. To the discerning readers in outsourcing community, one contrast should already be visible. He got the idea of flattening world from Infosys. He is looking for the new middle at EDS!
His search for the new middle makes him conclude, “you need two skills” for the flat world.
One is the ability to learn. “Because it’s really not what you know, it’s how you learn, because what you know today will be out of date tomorrow,” he says. That is really a unique, new requirement for the flat world. Except that, historian, novelist, and journalist, Henry Adams told this about a hundred years back:
They know enough who know how to learn.
The second, Friedman says, “the really intangible, creative, personalized things you bring to any job – that’s really where the value is going (The FT interviews)”. While by November 2005 (the time of the interview), Friedman was kind of finalizing the two new skill requirements, by February 2006, when he spoke at India, he had already developed a formula combining both: PQ+CQ>IQ. That is passion quotient and curiosity quotient are more important than intelligence quotient.
Friedman’s word coining skills inadvertently reminds one of the other Tom: Tom Peters. If Tom Peters made management ideas bedside reading, Friedman did the same to globalization. He got it from CEOs and academicians and presented it for all of us.
So is Friedman, then, a mere presenter? Many critics surely want us to believe so. But that is grossly unfair to the writer. A better description of Friedman would be: a mass theorizer. It is the combination of theorizing quickly and presenting it for a wider audience that is Friedman’s deadly weapon. The World is Flat is full with impressive phrases: The Fall of the Wall and the Rise of the Windows; 9/11 vs. 11/9; two challenges to America: Infosys and Al-Qaeda; Globalization 3.0… He has turned this ability to combine the two to nothing less than a fine art form.
Expect this fine art to be bettered in the updated version. Expect the phrases to be more impressive. Expect the contrasts and comparisons to be starker. But please, do not expect an earth-shattering new thought. That would be false expectations.
However, one thought that is refreshing is what he promised in his FT interview.
It’s been suggested to me that we actually turn the book into an open source product. Just put it up on the web like a Wikipedia and let people add to it. That may be what I’ll do down the road. There’s a lot of intellectual property issues around it, sure. But it’s something I’m thinking about: actually to make it a totally flat book and completely open source and let people, after I get done with this edition, just write the next edition.
That will be really great. Of course, if he actually does it.
globalization
I’m reading Tom’s book. I’m on chapt one right now. So far its pretty scary for Middle America who is standing in the middle of the road like a dear in the headlights. I see major benefits for China, India and American companies, but not much good for Americans who don’t take advantage of Globalization imediately.
http://www.selfstarterops.com/world-is-flat-bangalore-outsourcing