Book Notes: The World Is Flat (Part 2)

Dealing with a Flat World. There is one main question I think is important to answer: "As the labor pool increases substantially with globalization, what are the most important skills to develop as an individual in order to remain employable & competitive?"

The book suggests that the best jobs (for those of us in middle-class America) will be in several fields as the world continues to flatten:

• Great Collaborators and Orchestrators: "the manager who can work in and orchestrate 24/7/7 supply chains" (pg. 282). Somebody has to keep the work moving constantly moving through the system, across multiple continents (thus the 24/7/7- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across 7 continents)
• The Great Synthesizers: people who can combine their expertise with another major discipline- areas that would not traditionally not go together, such as biology and computer science. "Search engine optimizers, for example, bring together mathematicians and marketing experts" (pg. 283).
• The Great Explainers: With the new innovations that come from the Synthesizers, people will be needed who can understand the complexity of the innovation but explain it with simplicity.
• The Great Leveragers: people who can see a problem, stop it, and then redesign the system so the problem never happens again. "It's all about combining the best of what computers can do with the best of what humans can do, and then constantly reintegrating the new best practices the humans are innovating back into the system to make the whole--the machines and the people--that much more productive" (pg. 289).
• The Great Adapters: instead of being a generalist (broad skills but not deep) or a specialist (deep skills but not broad), a versatilist is someone who can "apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles. Versatilists are capable not only of constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing" (pg. 289). These are people that have a Swiss Army Knife of skills to offer.
• The Green People: simply stated, as countries continue to advance, the environment will continue to be a major issue. There will be plenty of jobs in addressing these challenges.
• The Passionate Personalizers: Alan Blinder suggests that there will be a renewal of personally delivered services instead of impersonally delivered services by computer-generated voices or voices from India.
• The Great Localizers: There is opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of the global capabilities that a flat world produces. "The localization of the global will be the freelancer who finds a way to use a satellite dish, a DSL line, a BlackBerry, a PC, or some new software to become a book editor or a film editor or an eBay entrepreneur from his or her bedroom" (pg. 295).

Other Notes:

• CQ + PQ > IQ: Creativity + Passion > Intelligence.
  
• "If you want to be sure that you are an untouchable", argues [Daniel Pink], a person with a job that "a computer or robot cannot do faster or some talented foreigner cannot do cheaper" and just as well, you need to focus on constantly developing your right-brain skills-"such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component" (pg 307).
• The American education system needs to be seriously revamped. There is not enough focus on science and engineering; there is not a passion in kids to learn- it is more of a chore. Instead of popularity being the result of intelligence, it is the result of wearing the right clothes and being involved in the right sports/activities. Our counterparts in China and India are extremely motivated to learn while we are moving at a snail's pace.
  

- John