Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

when the rate of change eventually exceeds the ability to adapt you get ‘dislocation.’ ‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.” That is what is happening now. “The

1959: The Year Everything Changed,

It is so great to meet you—now get out of the way while I disrupt your whole business. Oh, and have a nice day! We forget today that thinking you could

The McKinsey Digital Flows study noted that back in 1990, “the total value of global flows of goods, services, and finance amounted to $5 trillion, or 24 percent of world GDP. There were some 435 million international tourist arrivals, and the public Internet was in its infancy. Fast-forward to 2014: some $30 trillion worth of goods, services, and

finance, equivalent to 39 percent of GDP, was exchanged across the world’s borders. International tourist arrivals soared above 1.1 billion.” But here’s what’s even more interesting: Cross-border bandwidth [terabits per second] has grown 45 times larger since 2005. It is projected to grow by another nine times in the next five years as digital flows of commerce, information, searches, video, communication, and intra-company traffic continue to surge

That’s the best part of the globalization of flows today—its ability to foster contact between like-minded strangers or transform old friends who had become strangers back into friends and a community.

elephant.” A “black elephant,” it was explained to me by the London-based investor and environmentalist Adam Sweidan, is a cross between a “black swan”—a rare, low-probability,

unanticipated event with enormous ramifications—and “the elephant in the room: a problem that is widely visible to everyone, yet that no one wants to address, even though we absolutely know that one day it will have vast, black-swan-like consequences.”

making it possible to manufacture in almost workerless factories in advanced economies, automation could cut off the path of export-led growth that all of the successful East Asian economies pursued. The resulting high unemployment, particularly of young men, could foster political instability. The radical violence of ISIS has many roots, but

the tripling of the population of North Africa and the Middle East over the last 50 years certainly is one of them … With Africa’s population

likely to increase by more than three billion over the next 85 years, the European Union could be facing a wave of migration that makes current debates about accepting hundreds of thousands of asylum seeker...

And so it is with governing today. The only way to steer is to paddle as fast as or faster than the rate of change in technology, globalization, and the environment. The only way to thrive is by maintaining dynamic stability—that bike-riding trick that Astro Teller talked about. But what is the political and social equivalent of paddling as fast as the water or maintaining dynamic stability? It’s innovation in everything other than technology. It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids. It will take workplace innovation to identify exactly what humans can do better than machines and better with machines and increasingly train people for those roles.

is time to redouble our efforts to close that anxiety gap with imagination and innovation and not scare tactics and simplistic solutions that will not work. I

The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.

When you look inside many professions what you discover is soaring demand and very high pay for those best able to leverage technology—and the opposite for those least able. That is where the real “skills gaps” show up in many occupations. Try

The latest research backs this up. In an essay in The New York Times on October 18, 2015, entitled “Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work,” Claire Cain Miller pointed out that “for all the jobs that machines can now do—whether performing surgery, driving cars or serving food—they still lack one distinctly human trait. They have no social skills. Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work.”

And two experiences stood out from the poll of more than one million American workers, students, educators, and employers: Successful students had one or more teachers who were mentors and took a real interest in their aspirations, and they had an internship related to what they were learning in school. The most engaged employees, said Busteed, consistently attributed their success in the workplace to having had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person,” or having had “a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams,” or having had “an internship where they applied what they were learning.” Those workers, he found, “were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being.” There’s a message

Ronald Heifetz, who says the role of a leader is “to help people face reality and to mobilize them to make change” as their environment changes to ensure the security and prosperity of their community.

Finally, I am talking about a politics that understands that in today’s world the big political divide “is not left versus right but open versus closed,” as the pollster Craig Charney puts it, and that therefore chooses open—openness to trade, immigration, and global flows, as opposed to closing them off. If the traditional

The closest political analogue for the eye of a hurricane that I can think of is a healthy community. When people feel embedded in a community, they feel “protected, respected, and connected,” as my friend Andy Karsner, whose father grew up in Duluth and mother in Casablanca, likes to say. And that feeling is more important than ever, because when people feel protected, respected, and connected in a healthy community, it generates enormous trust. And when there is more trust in the room, citizens are much more likely to mirror Mother Nature’s killer apps. When people trust each other, they can be much more adaptable and open to all forms of pluralism. When people trust each other, they can think long-term. When there is trust in the room, people are more inclined to collaborate and experiment—to open themselves up to others, to new ideas, and to novel approaches—and to extending the

Golden Rule. They also don’t waste energy investigating every mistake; they feel free to fail and try again and fail again and try again. “Collaboration moves

at the speed of trust...

It was a powerful lesson in community for me: When you are in a real one, never, ever say to someone in need: “Call me if you need help.” If you want to help someone, just do it.

‘skyboxification of American life.’

The job of the council, Jacobs added, “is to get together and debate and discuss—but to do it in a way that preserves the relationship so we can get together next week and do it again.”

That’s why leadership also matters more now on the personal level. Back in the 1960s, in places like Minnesota, we had so much wind at our backs that “you needed a plan to fail.” No more. Now you need a plan to succeed, a plan for lifelong learning and skills growth. That means more personal leadership, more of everyone taking ownership of their own future and embracing the “start-up of you.” It is not too late for any of us, let