That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [36]
This change will affect America and Americans in many ways—from politics to commerce to the workplace to education. What interests us most in this chapter is how these forces are helping to reshape the workplace and the skills that the individual will need in order to get and hold a job. We can already see that this hyper-connecting of the world is altering everyone’s business and forcing everyone who is in business to learn how to take advantage of these new tools to become more productive, no matter how big or small their company is. We can see that when so many people have so many tools to compete, connect, and both pull and push new innovations and information, the speed with which companies need to update their own products or invent new ones before competitors overtake them just gets faster. We can also see that this hyper-connected world is empowering more individuals and small groups to start up their own companies and create new jobs with greater ease and for less money than ever before. And, finally, we can see that it is challenging every worker who wants to hold a job for any length of time at any company—large or small, new or old—to develop the skills needed to keep up.
Let’s look at all of these changes.
Everyone Is Feeling the Pressure
Michael Barber, the chief education officer for the Pearson publishing group and formerly the top education adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair, told us that whenever he lectures on globalization today he begins by telling this story: “I was at friend’s fiftieth birthday party in Wales. The morning after the party another guest and I agreed to take a walk up a nearby hill. We had not met before. To make conversation as we set out, I asked him, ‘What do you do?’ He said, ‘I am a monumental stonemason,’ which in British English means he carves gravestones. I immediately said to him, ‘It must be great to be in a line of work not affected by globalization.’ And he looks at me with this question mark in his eyes, and says, ‘What do you mean? If I didn’t buy my stone over the Internet from India, I’d be out of business.’ Everything had changed for him in the previous two or three years. If a stonemason [in Wales] has to get his best stone from India to stay competitive, there is no job left not affected by globalization.”
Barber’s story is not unusual these days. Whether you are talking to stonemasons or global corporate titans, all of them will tell you this: Changes in technology that affect their core enterprise are coming faster than they ever imagined, challenges are coming from places they never imagined, and opportunities are being opened in places they never imagined. Therefore every business executive large and small has to scour the world every day and take advantage of every way to access talent, develop new markets, and lower production costs—because if they don’t do it, it will be done to them.
Tom has interviewed Victor Fung, the group chairman of Li & Fung, one of Hong Kong’s oldest and most respected textile manufacturers, several times over the last decade. Fung grew up in the industry and for many years it operated on the same basic rules. As he explained: “You sourced in Asia, and you sold in America and Europe.” When Tom spoke with him in early 2011, Fung had a different message. In today’s hyper-connected world, he said, his whole business model has been flattened. Asia is becoming a huge market on its own, as are other areas of the developing world, and new manufacturing and design possibilities are opening up in places where they were never imaginable before. Said Fung, “Now our motto is ‘Source everywhere, manufacture everywhere, sell everywhere.’ The whole notion of an ‘export’ is really disappearing.”
Mike Splinter, the CEO of Applied Materials, echoes this point. “Outsourcing was ten years ago, where you’d say, ‘Let’s send some software generation overseas,’” he explained.