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

by Thomas L. Friedman

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.