THE ENTERPRISE
I immodestly titled this one a "must read" for several reasons--one selfish and the other, a very, very serious one.... as a concerned American.
First the selfish motive: I need help finding a media outlet--a magazine or large web-zine to publish my weekly writing. In the past (1995-2002) I've written columns: "On Management" for IndustryWeek (bi-weekly for 5 yrs.); the American Management Association's MWorld (weekly for 1-1/2 yrs.) on a wide variety of topics, and Fortune Small Business' fsb.com, primarily on Marketing, only for a few months. I've been writing THE ENTERPRISE for friends and contacts for over two years, and I enjoy the process of sharing thoughts and information. Now I'd like to expand. (Circulation is growing enough that my ISP makes me break it up into 6 e-mails just to dodge spam filters)
Any help, contacts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
Now, on with the real "MUST READ" part. A few years back, Thomas Friedman, an award winning NY Times journalist wrote "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" which was an excellent book on globalization. I've recommended it to many readers. What follows are some brief snippets from a lengthy NY Times Magazine article of his written to coincide with the release of his new book. This link may work (you may have to register first) if you want to read the entire article. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?ex=1113710400&en=246366f4cdee04fc&ei=5070 If it doesn't contact me directly by email.
Friedman's political views are sometimes different from mine, but he has a keen eye for what is happening, and is adept at explaining it in easy-to-read language. A lot of this article ....and I suspect his new book ''The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,'' Farrar, Straus & Giroux ...will concern you too... and it should alarm you. It does not describe a pretty scenario for US competitiveness in the future. Although Peter Drucker predicted much of this when he wrote of the growth of knowledge workers and the ease of exporting management, knowledge and work around the globe via electronic telecommunications and computers, now it is coming to pass. Friedman hits it hard and he is largely right.
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What follows are a series of excerpts from the NY Times Magazine, April 3, 2005 article "It's a Flat World , After All" by Thomas Friedman ... ©The New York Times
"...Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys [Bangalore, India] C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. ... Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia."
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So what, you might say. So this: distance is dead! There is no "there" anymore. There is only "here" and we are all "here"--if we want to be--electronically! Friedman continues.
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"Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
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Friedman's story goes on and in doing so, he explains what the term "Flat World" in the title of his article is all about.
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"At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''
'What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''
Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was telling me that the world was flat, as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world -- the fact that we [we--Americans--by spending the money to lay overcapacity in excessive amounts of high speed fiber optic cables and launch countless communications satellites] had made our world flat!)"
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If Netscape's browser was responsible for the start of the dot-com explosion, then its founder Marc Andreeson might be a good person to listen to:
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''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''
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Then comes the part that absolutely stopped me cold. It was right...and yet shocking. I always thought that America could win by innovating. Now I wonder if that is true.
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"When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids."
America has hung its economic hat on its ability to out-innovate competition from "LDCs"--which used to stand for "Less Developed Countries." But can we really call them "less developed" when, in 2001, India graduated almost a million more college graduates than the US, and China graduates twice as many and six times as many engineers? If those statistics don't worry you, you aren't paying attention! I could relate to his example from the cold war era, and I'd bet you could too.
"As a person who grew up during the cold war, I'll always remember driving down the highway and listening to the radio, when suddenly the music would stop and a grim-voiced announcer would come on the air and say: ''This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.'' And then there would be a 20-second high-pitched siren sound. Fortunately, we never had to live through a moment in the cold war when the announcer came on and said, ''This is a not a test.''
"That, however, is exactly what I want to say here: ''This is not a test.''...
"...We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ''Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving.'' But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, ''Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs.''
"I repeat, this is not a test. This is the beginning of a crisis that won't remain quiet for long."
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If you stayed with me this far, now is when you are wondering what to do. I wonder too. Perhaps that is the most important by-product of an article (and possibly a book) like this--a call to action. Perhaps our most daunting challenge of the next two decades will not be to put someone in space, or to win the "space race" or the "weapons race", but to retain America's preeminent position in a global economy. That may very well mean winning the "brain race" and growing a new crop of young American scientists who don't just play electronic games, but win electronic competition. Perhaps our education gap and our societal entitlement gap are combining to lead to a future huge economic gap.
Friedman is right...and wrong ...when he uses the metaphor phrase "this is not a test" It IS a test--the greatest test of our next 2-3 American generations! Their future depends on "passing it."
Best, John
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