而且，还是今年的"the best business book of the year"。刚给他写了个邮件，恭喜了一下。难得。尤其是这个podcast的卖得最好的，更是难得。
不知道我们的keso同志读完了这本书没有？
Financial Times前两天对他的一个访谈。访谈里他拿土豆做例子说明这个平的世界有多么的不同，（没提我们的网站名，估计对他来说，toodou这个名字也太难记了，哈）。
文章链接在这儿。
Business Book of the Year, Friedman Speaks
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4d0cec20-5d0b-11da-a749-0000779e2340.html
还有偷懒的？我把全文拷在正文了。
[@more@]Friedman speaks
By Andrew Hill
Published: November 24 2005 18:06 | Last updated: November 24 2005 18:06
Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, a rumbustious account of the challenges and opportunities presented by globalisation, was this week named winner of the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Andrew Hill, the FT’s Financial Editor, interviewed him about the evolution of his ideas since publication of the book, his perhaps inadvertent role as a management guru for the 21st century, and his plans for the future. This is an edited transcript of the interview.
Andrew Hill: Have you become more optimistic or more pessimistic about the implications of globalisation since The World Is Flat was published?
Thomas Friedman: It’s a good question. You catch me in Dallas. I’m at EDS, Ross Perot’s old company, where I’m working on an updated version of the book. I’m going to produce sometime this spring a completely updated and expanded edition of the book because the whole subject is alive. So as soon as I finished this edition, I kept on writing and reporting.
Let me give you a tiny example. Three weeks ago, in the first week of November, the audio version of this book was the number one selling podcast album on Apple’s iTunes, ahead of all kinds of rock and roll, rap and whatever. That got me enormous juice with my teenage daughters. But what’s really interesting is that when I started this book in March 2004, podcasting didn’t exist. So here’s a format that has emerged – which I think is going to be a monster – which didn’t exist when I started this book. It wasn’t like I started this book in 2000 or 1999: I started it in 2004. I finished it in December 2004 and podcasting didn’t exist. Now the audio version of this book is number one selling podcast album for one day on Apple iTunes. And what’s even more sort of interesting to me is: Who invented podcasting? Nobody. It was a kind of emerging application that just kind of emerged from the network. I really have come to appreciate more and more that the flat world is really a platform – a global, web-nabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge, work, innovation and entertainment.
Wealth is going to go in the future to those countries, those companies, those individuals, those universities, those communities who get three things right. The infrastructure that connect with this platform, the education to innovate off this platform, so they can get the most out of it, and the government to kind of manage the flow between your community, your institution, your society and this platform, that could be everything from tax policy to innovation, to law and order. What I believe more than ever is that this “flat world”, this platform really is coming together: it’s going to be the centre of everything. That’s the good news.
What I believe also, more than ever, is that this platform is a friend of Infosys [the Indian information technology company] as much as it’s a friend of al-Qaeda – that the bad guys are using this platform more than ever. All the reports that I read of … rioting in France stressed how the different rioters were using instant messaging, SMS, the internet, to deploy people and we’re seeing these really flat global supply chains for emerging forms of terrorism, where somebody in Jordan copies something done in Sharm El Sheikh and so on.
AH: It sounds to me as though you feel there’s been a balanced evolution in the implications of globalisation since the book has been published, including lots of new developments that have increased people’s “connectedness”.
TF: Exactly, and one of the points of this book is that globalisation does two things. It allows the big to act really small. So it allows that big company to tailor things, customise things just for you. And it allows the small to act very big. That can be the small individual who starts a website and now can have a global network of customers and suppliers. But it also lets the small individual who wants to start a riot in France or create mayhem in Bali to do so. That’s why the last chapter of the book is “11/9 versus 9/11”. When you have this platform that so empowers individuals, what people imagine really matters. Whether it’s the imagination of 11/9 – the day the Berlin Wall came down – or 9/11, the day the Twin Towers came down, I think is going to present more and more of a challenge to open societies.
AH: You write at one point in the book that you don’t consider yourself to be a business writer. The FT and Goldman Sachs have named The World Is Flat business book of the year. And a number of our judges pointed out that they had already picked up the book themselves at companies that they were visiting or seen it on managers’ desks. The book presents a very grand vision of what’s happening in globalisation, but are there in fact specific lessons that companies can draw from it? Is it the kind of book that people should pick up and say “I’m going to learn three things from this”, or is it the kind of book whose conclusions should just sit at the back of business people’s minds and inform their decisions?
TF: In a sense, you’re asking “To what extent is the book saying ‘how to’ and to what extent is it saying ‘what is’.” I wasn’t trying to write a “how to” book and I don’t see myself as the author of “Ten ways to profitability” or anything like that. It started on a personal level for me. I went to India and I went to Bangalore and I would see things – everything from people tracing their lost luggage on Delta Airlines, people reading x-rays and doing tax returns from Americans from Bangalore. I was seeing things that I didn’t understand, quite honestly; these were things that clearly had gone beyond the scope of my last book on globalisation, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. When I, whose job is to explain things to readers of the New York Times, see things that I can’t explain to myself, then I know I’ve got a problem, and I really felt a sense of crisis. At the end of filming the documentary that I talk about at the beginning of the book, I asked myself, “How did this happen? What did I miss? What is the underlying platform here that I
don’t understand?” That’s really what triggered the book. So, at one level, the book is the journey I took trying to answer that question. I hope that in answering that question for myself, I provide a way for average people to answer it, people who are, I think, vexed by some of the same issues, but also people in the business world.
The reaction to the book falls into two broad areas. I’ve got tons of mail from educators about just the issue I’ve raised: the challenge posed to how we raise our kids, how we teach them, how we educate them in a world where so many more educated kids are going to be able to compete with your kids and mine. That’s a big part of what drives the book. Parents have said to me, “My daughter is studying Chinese – she’s going to be okay, right?” And I say, “Well, not exactly. There is no magic elixir here.” The concern that my kids aren’t going to live as well as I do, when I was sure that I was going to live better than my parents, is a real undertow, at least in America and I think in western developed countries. That is one issue that’s driven the book.
The other area that specifically applies to business is simply how to think about what this flat-world platform means for how we innovate and how we collaborate. I’m here at EDS in Dallas because what I’m focused on right now is trying to understand who is going to be in “the new middle class”. In the flat world, as I say in the book, everyone wants to be an “untouchable” – someone whose job cannot be outsourced. In the book I talk about two categories of untouchables. The people who are specialists – Michael Jordan, Madonna, your cardiac surgeon: they’re not going to be outsourced or automated. Then there are people who are really localised – your dentist, the guy who collects the garbage, the nurse at the clinic, the chef, the waiter. They’re also not going to be outsourced. But in between are more and more jobs that are either going to be subject to some degree, if not in totality, to automation and outsourcing. Those were the jobs of the middle class. They were both blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs. So the question I’m asking myself now – which is implicit in this edition of the book and which I’m going to drive even more in the next – is What will be the new middle? Who will be the new middle class, what will be the new middle class jobs in a flat world? What I’m doing is working backwards. So I come to EDS and I say, “Who are you hiring, who has jobs here?” I look at all these people with jobs and ask “Who are these people, what do they do?” Then I work backwards and go to universities and say: “To what extent are you changing your curriculum and education to train people for these jobs of the new middle?” That’s where the first group I talk about – people worried about education – meet the business side.
So I don’t pretend this is a “how to” book and that if you read it there’s going to be ten things you’re going to pick up to take down to the shop floor. But I am convinced that if you read it you’ll understand what world you’re living in, both as a parent and as a business executive or entrepreneur – and I think that has value.
AH: Lloyd Blankfein [president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs], one of the book award judges, said during the shortlist judging session that your book made him feel he had to take his children out of school in America and put them into school in China or India. The question, if you’re a teacher or indeed a manager on a shorter timescale, is: “The world is changing so quickly – how should I adapt my strategy? Can I possibly afford to take a bet on the future, if it is changing that quickly? Isn’t it safer to stand back and wait and see if I can ride the wave?”
TF: Well, some would say that there were some big computer companies who said that about search. And that wave – in the form of Google – came along so far that they completely missed it and are playing catch-up. I have a friend of mine who likes to say that when the world is flat, you’re always in beta – that is, you’re constantly testing out new ideas. Here at EDS, they manage the computer systems of a lot of different companies around the world. So who are the new engineers they’re hiring? They’re not just people who can leverage technology. The machine can do a lot more things, and they can do the really high-order tasks. But they are people who are well-trained in the business not only of EDS but in the business of EDS’s customers. They can not only solve problems when they come up, they can actually design new solutions on the fly: that’s how this company creates value. Because more and more businesses now are part of supply chains, you have to be able to design solutions not only for your customer, so his business works well, but, because the world is flat, to design solutions for your customer’s customers