Below, folks, is a powerful article by Thomas Friedman expressing what a lot of us find hard to articulate. He’s captur
ed the multidimensional and chaotic nature of globalisation and the Internet, and what it means for us.
It means, he says, we have to be pro-active. Being a ‘status quo’ person no longer cuts it. “Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you.”
For CEOs this creates headaches; for communicators, huge challenges. Change management is now a required everyday skill.
If you find this exciting and not scary, then you are a potential winner. However, if it’s scary and not exciting, then it could be tough. Read on….
It’s a 401(k) World
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN April 30, 2013
It’s hard to have a conversation today with any worker, teacher, student or boss who doesn’t tell you some version of this: More things seem to be changing in my world than ever before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it, let alone know how to adapt. So let me try to put my finger on it: We now live in a 401(k) world — a world of defined contributions, not defined benefits — where everyone needs to pass the bar exam and no one can escape the most e-mailed list.
Here is what I mean: Something really big happened in the world’s wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago when I wrote a book called “The World Is Flat.” All of that came since then, and the combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.
What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source — all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.
If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. (More? Click the link above)
