Staying Middle Class (Or Don’t Cede Any Century to a Country that Censors Google)

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Opinion

Staying Middle Class (Or Don’t Cede Any Century to a Country that Censors Google)

7/12/2006

Great Leveragers: These are people who can leverage technology to do more with less. You can maintain that middle class role if you are the kind of person who can make technology let you do the job of 20 offshore employees.

Great Explainers: These are obviously teachers, but also administrators and middle managers who have the talent to explain and teach, and even better, to explain and teach to others who can then teach and explain to more.

Great Synthesizers: These are the people who can see “A” and “B” and make “C” out of it. In a horizontal world, if you can think outside the box and find connections and ways to make bits and pieces into more, you are valuable.

Great Localizers: If you can take the global platform that now exists and use it to serve up localized information and services, you can stay in that middle class. These would be small- to mid-sized businesses.

Green: Yep, this category is just plain called “Green,” because of the certainty that we all have to go green and this will be a boom industry for the foreseeable future. Be sustainable, save the environment, slow or stop global warming: a big industry of the near future.

Passionate Personalizers: Friedman’s example here was of a lemonade vendor in the Baltimore baseball stadium who didn’t just sell water + sugar + lemon juice, but made it into entertainment and got lots of tips. The fellow now d'es his lemonade thing at private parties. (Maybe this g'es under the special talent category that preceded these eight?)

Great Adapters: These are the people who have learned how to learn and can flex with circumstances. Friedman’s example was a person named “Marsha,” who has worked for a big company for 15 years, and had gone through a series of jobs, each of which was downsized or offshored, but her ability to learn and flex had kept her in increasingly more responsible positions.

Friedman closed with a few final points:

Educators need to understand how very important it is for young people to focus on the ability to learn how to learn. His formula “CQ + PQ is greater than IQ” means that passion and perseverance are more important to individual success than basic intelligence.

C = Curiosity; P = Passion; I = Intelligence

He shared a point made by Dan Pink: When the world is flat, everything on the boring, functional, organized left side of the brain can be done by an overachiever from India or can be automated. That creative, innovative, passionate, right-brain is more important. The left brain is useful.

He noted that American students excel more and more at right-brain stuff and finished by saying that even in a year when Washington is brain dead and Congress is paralyzed, the explosion of innovation, especially in the fields of education and energy, combined with the openness of our economy, may yet keep America at the forefront.

Some people see the 1800s as the European era, the 1900s as the American era, and the 2000s becoming the Chinese era. Friedman jokingly finished by saying that his grandma had an old saying that helps him to be a little more confident that we do not necessarily have to cede the 21 st century to China.

She used to say, he said: “Don’t cede any century to a country that censors Google.”

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"Staying Middle Class (Or Don’t Cede Any Century to a Country that Censors Google)," Campus Technology, 7/12/2006, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=41042

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