I love living back in the Dallas/Ft Worth area. I mean L-O-V-E, love it.
It is great to be living in a place where I am afforded great opportunities to do neat things. Every band imaginable comes through town, there are wonderful festivals and community events every weekend, and there are ample opportunities to see and hear great voices.
Last night, I had the opportunity to hear Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat speak at the University of Texas at Arlington. Friedman was speaking on his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution- and How It Can Renew America. This isn’t a pithy commentary on recycling your Coke cans or hooking up your home with solar panels. This is a call to radically change the face of the planet by harnessing the imagination and innovation of 300 million Amercans to once again solve a giant “multi-generational” problem. We’ve done it in the past, Friedman argues, and we MUST do it again.
I’m still trying to process everything and I’m plowing through the book as we speak. Like his other books it is dense but extremely engaging and highly readable.
I hope to finish the book over the weekend and I’ll post my thoughts on it and the lecture early next week.
Ofcourse, Friedman being Freidman, he is only concerned about what is happening within US and how US can save the world by adopting a greeen technology. In his earlier book it was information technology. How simplistic can he get?
As for the globalization, Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel winner for economics and was Chief Economist at World Bank) said while on a trip to India, that 600 million people from India (out of the one billion!) have been left out of the “development” fold of globalization. So, obviously, all India is not going to migrate into middle class, if anything the inequality is far, far worse now, after the advent of globalization. But Friedman wants to write only about a few, corporate-few is more like it, who have been able to reap the benefits of globalization. And he has not only conveniently forgotten just countries, but whole continents, like Africa, which dont find a mention in his books.
There is a small, but interesting book, by Aronica and Ramdoo, “The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times Bestseller,” which offers a counterperspective to Friedman’s theory on globalization. It is a small book compared to the 600 page tome by Friedman, and aimed at the common man and students alike. As popular as the book may be, some reviewers assert that by what it leaves out, Friedman’s book is dangerous. The authors point to the fact that there isn’t a single table or data footnote in Friedman’s entire book.
“Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution,” says Aronica. Aronica and Ramdoo conclude by listing over twenty action items that point the way forward, for understanding the critical issues of globalization.
You may want to see http://www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch http://www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an interesting counterperspective on Friedman’s
“The World is Flat”.
Also a really interesting 6 min wake-up call: Shift Happens! http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html
There is also a companion book listed: Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
http://www.mkpress.com/extreme
http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html