The World is Flat

I spent a hour at Barnes & Noble browsing through New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's excellent The World is Flat. In it, he tries to makes sense of the increasing competition between what was once the Third World and the West because of advances in telecommunicationms, outsourcing, the internet revolution, and the explosion of wealth in India and China.

I was especially interested in what I and my kids can do to adapt to this Brave New World. The old advice parents would give their kids "Eat up, because children in Asia are starving" has now been replaced by "Work harder, because children in Asia are starving for your job." In this world where ererything that goes down the wire is up for grabs take a new attitude. For three years, I managed a software team 13 hours away in Bangalore, and can testify that they are equal in competence and motivation to what the United States has. Friedman reduces a long discussion in national, corporate, and individual strategies for survivial to this formula:

CQ + PQ > IQ

Creativity and passion is employable intelligence. So that will also be my advice for my kids. We are competing with the world, which we means we must develop not just digitizable technical skills. We must also develop those soft skills that our mothers taught you and that we perhaps picked up in English, art, and music class-- play nicely and see and think differently.