Finding the New Middle

Friedman poses the question: What do we tell our kids about job opportunites in their future? He follows with:

Every young American today would be wise to think of himself or herself as competing against every young Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian. In Globalization 3.0, individuals have to think globally to thrive, or at least survive.

Friedman himself states that he has to understand how he needs to compete and he must have the skill set required to work at a pace that fits the supply chain.

When he was young his parents told him "Tom, finish your dinner - people in China and India are starving." His advise to his daughters is, "Girls, finish your homework - people in China and India are starving for your jobs."

In a flat world, people in any country can have any job, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker - wherever he or she resides.

The New Middle

In order to thrive, students will have to learn to do the right kind of homework. Students will have to fundamentally reorient what they are learning and educators how they are teaching it.

The key to thriving in the flat world is to make yourself an "untouchable." Untouchables are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced, digitized, or automated; i.e. fungible.

Available technology (transportation & communications) largely determines which goods and services are easy to trade internationally and which are hard or impossible to trade.

Untouchables

• Special or specialized
• special - Michael Jordon, MaDonna, Elton John
• specialized - brain surgeons,
• Localized & anchored
• know specific knowledge
• face-to-face - barber, chefs, plumber, nurses, clerks, repairmen, cleaning ladies, divorce lawyers
• "Old Middle"
• middle class jobs - from assembly line to data entry to securities analysis to radiology
• new middle jobs are coming into being all the time that require certain skill sets that make you special - temporary.

The New Middlers

• Great Collaborators and Orchestrators
• with and between companies
• providing 24/7/7 supply chains
• The Great Synthesizers
• Mash-ups - where you just mash together two different Web-based tools, Google maps & real estate
• The Great Explainers
• who can see the complexity but explain it with simplicity
• if you can explain the complexity well, you can see the opportunities better
• The Great Leverages
• Combing 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.
• The Great Adapters
• Versatilists - apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles
• constantly learning and growing
• Be an expert on 3 topics, but know that those three topics will always be changing.