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We call this Carlson’s Law: Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. This makes it all the more important for every worker to be a creative creator or creative server and for every boss to understand that the boss’s job is to take advantage of Carlson’s Law—to find ways to inspire, enable, and unleash innovation from the bottom up, and then to edit, manage, and merge that innovation from the top down to produce goods, services, and concepts.

“We had a group visiting SRI from Japan the other day,” Carlson told us in March 2011, “and one of them asked me: ‘How many big decisions do you make every day?’ I said, ‘My goal is to make none of them. I am not the one interacting daily with the customer or the technology. My employees are the ones interacting, so if [moving ahead on a project] has to wait for me to decide, that is too slow. That does not mean I don’t have a job. My job is to help create an environment where those decisions can happen where they should happen—and to support them and reward them and inspire them.’”

Carlson said he thinks of himself more as “the mayor” of his company, orchestrating all the departments and listening to his constituencies, rather than as a classic top-down CEO.

So there it is: This is not your grandparents’ labor market anymore. It is not even your parents’. Each and every one of us has to be “present” now, all the time, in whatever we do, so that we can be either creative creators or creative servers. That’s where the jobs will be. This is why our schools need to prepare all students for careers in which they not only do their assigned tasks but offer something extra. For everyone to find his or her “extra” will require both more education and better education. The next two chapters are about how we can deliver this so every American can adapt to the merger of globalization and the IT revolution.

SIX

Homework x 2 = The American Dream

ORLANDO, Fla., May 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/—Students from Zhejiang University have been crowned World Champions of the 2011 Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. Sponsored by IBM, the competition, also known as the “Battle of the Brains,” challenged 105 university teams to solve some of the most challenging computer programming problems in just five hours. Mastering both speed and skill, Zhejiang University successfully solved eight problems in five hours. The World Champions will return home with the “world’s smartest” trophy as well as IBM prizes, scholarships and a guaranteed offer of employment or internship with IBM. This year’s top twelve teams that received medals are:

• Zhejiang University (Gold, World Champion, China)

• University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (Gold, 2nd Place, USA)

• Tsinghua University (Gold, 3rd Place, China)

• St. Petersburg State University (Gold, 4th Place, Russia)

• Nizhny Novgorod State University (Silver, 5th Place, Russia)

• Saratov State University (Silver, 6th Place, Russia)

• Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Silver, 7th Place, Germany)

• Donetsk National University (Silver, 8th Place, Ukraine)

• Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Bronze, 9th Place, Poland)

• Moscow State University (Bronze, 10th Place, Russia)

• Ural State University (Bronze, 11th Place, Russia)

• University of Waterloo (Bronze, 12th Place, Canada)

Hillary Clinton never asked us for career advice. Had she done so, we would have told her this: When President Barack Obama came to you and offered the job of secretary of state, you should have said, “No, thank you. I prefer to hold the top national security job. Mr. President, it would have been wonderful to have been secretary of state during the Cold War, when that job was crucial. True, some things haven’t changed. Now, as in the past, the secretary of state spends all his or her time talking to and negotiating with other governments. Now, as in the past,