Sunday, October 30, 2011

Flat World 2.0 : Time to find our 'extra' ?




Last night I had the opportunity to watch the 76 minute video - Thomas Friedman's lecture at Linkedin -on his latest book. It is actually a 35 minute talk-and followed by 40 minutes of Q&A. (Courtesy : the Linkedin Blog)

The  Master story teller summed up the change since the time he wrote his earlier book in 2004

When I said the world is flat, Facebook didn’t exist. Or for most people it didn’t exist.  Twitter was a sound.  The Cloud was in the sky. 4G was a parking place. LinkedIn was a prison. Applications were something you sent to college. And, for most people, Skype was a typo.

That all happened in the last seven years. And what it has done is taken the world from connected to hyper-connected. And that’s been a huge opportunity and a huge challenge.

To me, the takeaways from the lecture-was the description of the effect on the labour market or jobs-as we have moved away from just a 'connected world' to the 'hyperconnected' world!

Thanks to the combination of globalisation and IT revolution, he observed

- the 'routine work' -ie the ones that can be described by an algorithm -has been crushed. Several jobs simply don't exist any more!

-the game has risen for the 'non routine work'-the ones that call for critical reasoning & problem solving.

So much so -that every individual has to have a unique value creation proposition!

His mantra for us to take charge of our own career?

-  the need for each of us to have an internal OODA – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act – loop that is faster than that of our competition.
 -The critical importance of realizing that “average is over”; and, also that the economy of the future will reward individuals who deliver “extra” in their roles and “invent, re-invent, and re-engineer” the way they drive value out of their jobs
Well, are we preparing ourselves for the New World? 


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