Tom Friedman came by Feb 15th to Bombay to meet a few of us.
He says people tell him: we get it, the world is flat, now what do we do?
His answer is coming in The World is Flat version 2.0 but, in brief, his answer is “Education!”
He believes that talent shortage is becoming an issue for India’s infotech industry; the industry is bumping its head at the limits of Business Process Outsourcing and must get ready for Knowledge Process Outsourcing. For this you need young people who will ask Why.The Indian IT industry is too full of people who ask How.
The problem that the Indian IT industry has is that companies are forced to run their own training school because government is doing such a poor quality job of running the public education system.
He believes that so long as the US economy grows at 3% + outsourcing will not be a political issue. You will need a huge recession for it to come back as an issue. The American public is starting to understand the benefits to the US economy of outsourcing.
On the nuclear proliferation issue,he believes that if Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabi and Egypt will immediately follow. Only India, China and Russia can stop Iran. India and China must be stakeholders in the post-Cold War world. Both are prospering today because of the post- Cold War peace. India and China cannot be free-riders in this.
Would you say that USA is towards a definite slowdown in the economy??
Specially after today when the housing sector has hit a bottom, and the Feds are concerned over economic growth ??
What about India’’s economic story ?? Is the market overheated?
Tom friedman left me speechless with his book about a year ago when I joined the corporate workforce of america.
With the dynamics of world now changing so fast, I wonder — if he ever published a “world is flat v 5.0 ” , would it even talk about india/China??
Just a pondering !
Btw, Mr. Balakrishnana, do u even read the comments posted on ur iland?
I think our paradigm of education needs to change. For instance, many self-employed professionals like myself would like to go back to school after the kids are grown up. We have the financial and mental muscle to make a difference in many multidisciplinary areas. But the scope for such second-layer education is very limited. Also, education needs to be delivered to more experienced people in a different way. For instance, if you”re teaching someone like me how to construct a web page, it won”t do to say, “first write etc.” They would need to approach the problem in a task-oriented manner: “Here’’s how the rediff.com page looks, and here’’s the document source. Now let’’s see what this particular piece of coding does.” That would of course call for more educated and well-trained teachers than they currently have.
I love Tom Friedman’s writing - not had time to read The World Is Flat but
I better do so before version 2.0 is out! His “The Lexus and hte Olive
Tree” was just too good - super informative and yet so easy to read.