An Interview with Thomas L. Friedman

I know that I've caught a wave, Nayan, and so...

Chanda: What was that wave?

Friedman: What was that wave? And I guess that the best way I could summarize it is that it's a wave of anxiety, it's a wave that basically I would describe like this: Our parents were sure that they were going to live better than their parents, and they were just as sure that we, their children, were going to live better than them. Our generation is now coming to retirement worried that we may not retire as well as our parents. And you know what, our kids may not live as well as we do. And I think that anxiety, that anxiety that we are now being touched by people who have never touched us before, we're competing with people who we've never competed with before, and, fortunately, we're collaborating with people we've never been able to collaborate with before. But for all those reasons, there is a wave of anxiety out there, that there's a lot of things changing; a lot of traditional boundaries are being eliminated, competition is much more intense. And, gosh, I wonder if my kids are going to live as well as me.

Chanda: So the fear of the unknown, of what is ahead. Things are changing so fast.

Friedman: It's the fear of the unknown, Nayan, and I would say the known, because it's the fear of what people see as real competition now, coming from corners that they've never seen it before, coming in the white-collar realm, not just the blue-collar realm where we've become used to it, and not knowing where it stops. OK, the call-center operator, well that's not important, but my radiologist, you know, is now using outsourcing to have X-rays read somewhere. My accountant, you know, can now draw on someone in India to do accounting. So now so many more things now seem able to be digitized, automated or outsourced. Where that starts or stops is I think what has a lot of people concerned.

Chanda: Judging by the reaction you have got in Silicon Valley, you have been almost made into a prophet there. Now how do you see the US high tech companies adjusting to this flat world?

Friedman: Now, you know, the good news is everything I learned about the flat world, I learned from companies. I learned from CEO's, CIO's and CTO's, who were doing it. Two things were happening. One thing is, they were doing it, but they weren't talking about it. Because no one – who wanted to talk about outsourcing?

Chanda: Right.

Friedman: And it's one of the kind of reasons that I walked into a vacuum on this book, an intellectual vacuum, is that the people who are doing it, and boy they're doing it, they are doing it at the cutting edge, and thank goodness because they're really driving American competitiveness and companies forward. But they didn't want to talk about it. Nobody wanted to talk about it.

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Chanda: The other group of people I think who have been very troubled by your book is the education circle in the United States, I've been hearing from people who are extremely worried as to what this flat world means for you as an educated system. What do you think is going to happen there?

Friedman: Well, you know, if I've gotten feedback from any group, any single group, more than any other, it's from American educators, school superintendents, teachers and whatnot. All of whom, you know, sense that we're not really staying at the cutting edge, that we're not getting this competition, and we're not strategizing enough about it. And it's actually quite exciting, there's an incredible amount of experimentation going on in education in America today. I'm actually an optimist. I'm actually much more optimistic today than when you and I talked about the book a year ago. Because I see the reaction not just to the book but to the moment that the book describes. It's not one of triumphalism, not "We'll be OK, we'll all be fine." No, no, it's "Whoa, the sky is falling! Good, that's good." The sky actually isn't falling, you know, it's not that bad. But that's good, the reaction has been immediate, it's been energetic and it's been mobilized. And so what I've seen in going out to schools is a tremendous amount of experimentation about what is the right approach to improve our math, science fundamentals, to get more young men and women into math and science. And so what I've done, is I'm now updating the book, there'll be a new 2.0 version, there'll be a new version of the book out in mid-April. It's just expanded and updated, basically. And I've focused a lot, in this book, this new version, on education, on what I call "the new middle." We knew what the old middle-class jobs were. Well I would argue that in the flat world, with certain things being outsourced and digitized, we now really ought to think about what are the new middle jobs, because there's, we need a middle class. So what will be the jobs? What I really did last year, Nayan, was go around to American companies and say, "Who works here? Him over there, what does he do? She looks like she's got an interesting job, what's she up to?" And after enough of this, I basically distilled, down to eight categories, what I called the categories of the new middle. And these aren't specific jobs, you know, widget operator here, you know. It's sort of broad categories, and these will be the new categories of the new middle. I'll go through them very quickly for you. One is great collaborators. When so many more things are going to be made in global supply chains, the ability to be a great collaborator, to be able to work cross-culturally and multinationally, there's going to be a huge number of jobs around managing and coordinating these global supply chains. Second are great leveragers, people who can leverage technology, so one person can do the job of twenty. Rather than competing with India or China, where twenty people might do the job of one, you make up for the labor cost by leveraging technology. Third are great explainers. Boy, there's going to be a whole industry in explaining. Because there's enormous complexity out there, so whether you're a teacher, a manager, a journalist, the ability to explain this complexity is going be in huge demand. Fourth, I would call great localizers. Great localizers are people who can localize the global. What does that mean? They can take the power of this global platform and turn it into a local business. Now that's everything from the eBay entrepreneur, Mom and Pop who have now started a business on eBbay, to the garage owner in New Haven, who goes online one day and says to his partner, "Hey Bill, did you see this? We can get out hubcaps for half-price from Romania at half the cost that it would take us to get them from Rochester." So they're leveraging the global platform, by localizing the global. There'll be a huge industry in that, Nayan. Fifth, I'd say, are gonna be people who are great adapters. People who can stay one step ahead of the forces of digitization and automation. And that's going to apply to a lot of people in a lot of industries. Sixth would be what I would call people who are passionate personalizers. If you can bring real passion and a personal touch to any vanilla task, there's going to be a job for you in the flat world. Seventh I would call anything green. Nayan, anything green, and there is a job for you in the twenty-first century. Because green technology is going to be the industry of the 21st century. So those are some of the categories that I'm looking at.

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Friedman: It was interesting, Nayan. I was at Nascom, the Indian high-tech association's annual meeting, and full of some of the brainiest and most innovative people in India, but the buzz, the subterranean buzz that I found there was all about, "woe is me," basically. We're now doing a lot of BPO, that's India' specialty, business process outsourcing. That's everything from answering your phone, to writing your software, to running your back room, your human resources department. A good business, but India's getting competition in that field now. Vietnam will come in there, Eastern Europe. They've got to move, they know, to KPO, knowledge process outsourcing, where you don't just tell me – I don't just do the "how," I do the "what." I actually conceive of the project, the idea, and then I execute and implement it. To do that, though, you need a different type of mindset. You need a mindset that's questioning, that's innovative, that's synthesizing. And Indian education has been very good for pounding in those fundamentals. We know that, and nobody does it better. It's been great at getting people who know how to do the "how." But it has not been great for creating people to know to ask the "what." And – or the "why." And, of course, that's the strength of the United States. We need more people with good fundamentals, they need more people who are creative, and that's where you're getting this kind of grand convergence. So I think you're going to see, over time, a loosening up of the rigid Indian education system, and introducing a lot more "what" and "why" into the classroom, because the talent is there, we know. It's just really how you shape it and reshape it.

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