Thank You for Being Late Quotes

“Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China’s total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today—a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China’s wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their book, the four key measures of an economy’s health (per capita GDP, labor productivity, the number of jobs, and median household income) all rose together for most of the Cold War years. “For more than three decades after World War II, all four went up steadily and in almost perfect lockstep,” Brynjolfsson noted in a June 2015 interview with the Harvard Business Review. “Job growth and wage growth, in other words, kept pace with gains in output and productivity. American workers not only created more wealth but also captured a proportional share of the gains.” In”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The Cold War was a struggle between two competing systems of order, dominated by two competing superpowers, who could, relatively speaking, keep their allies ideologically in line, physically intact, and militarily in check. The relevant geographic and ideological dividing lines were East–West, communist–capitalist, totalitarian–democratic. In”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“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.” Those”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Qualcomm is putting these sensor clips on all forty-eight buildings in San Diego. Suddenly the building maintenance guys “got converted to data engineers, which is exciting for them,” added Tipirneni. They made sure the data was “distilled in a way that is easy for them to understand and be actionable. In the old days, when a facilities manager looked at a building, he would say: “If there is a leak someone will call me or I will see it.” They were reactive. Now, says Tipirneni, “We trained them to look at signals and data that will point them to a leak before it happens and causes destruction. They did not know what data to look at, so our challenge was [to] make sensor data easy for them to make sense of, so we don’t overwhelm them with too much data and just say ‘You figure it out.’ Our goal was, ‘We will give you information you can use.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“To graduate, Miller added, all Olin students “must complete a yearlong engineering design project in small teams with a corporate sponsor that provides financial support for each project. The projects require a corporate liaison engineer and often involve nondisclosure agreements and new product development.” Olin”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The supernova is enabling a deeper revolution that is just beginning, spurred by learning platforms such as Udacity, edX, and Coursera, that will change the very metabolism and shape of higher education and, one hopes, lift the adaptability line in the way that”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Google released the basic algorithms for a program called TensorFlow for public consumption by the open-source community. TensorFlow is a set of algorithms that enable fast computers to do “deep learning” with big data sets to perform tasks better than a human brain. “By January 2016 we had a course online on how to use the TensorFlow open-source platform to write deep learning algorithms to teach a machine to do anything—copyediting, flying a plane, or legal discovery from documents,” explained Thrun.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Our employee engagement surveys showed a 30 percent improvement in lost sick days in one year. People are calling in sick less because they are feeling more empowered, more of a sense of ownership, and more connected.” Jump-Starting”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“It costs about two thousand dollars just to hire someone, so our preference always is to use our internal employees. It is more cost-effective and will generate more employee engagement and productivity, which means employees will go the extra mile so customers will be served better and shareholder value will increase. The companies with the most highly engaged workforces earn three times those with less. But”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“So, at a minimum, our educational systems must be retooled to maximize these needed skills and attributes: strong fundamentals in writing, reading, coding, and math; creativity, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration; grit, self-motivation, and lifelong learning habits; and entrepreneurship and improvisation—at every level. The”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“In 2011, the NASSCOM team introduced me to Aloke Bajpai, who, like others on his young team, cut his teeth working for Western technology companies but returned to India on a bet that he could start something—he just didn’t know what. The result was Ixigo.com, a travel search service that can run on the cheapest cell phones and helps Indians book the lowest-cost fares, whether it is a farmer who wants to go by bus or train for a few rupees from Chennai to Bangalore or a millionaire who wants to go by plane to Paris. Ixigo is today the biggest travel search platform in India, with millions of users. To build it, Bajpai leveraged the supernova, using free open-source software, Skype, and cloud-based office tools such as Google Apps and social media marketing on Facebook. They “enabled us to grow so much faster with no money,” he told me. It”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“globalization of flows: pulling commodity parts mainly from China and South Korea, using open-source software and collaboration tools, and employing the design/manufacturing/assembly abilities of two companies in the West—DataWind and Conexant Systems—and Quad in India.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won’t distinguish someone’s intelligence—rather, the ability to ask all the right questions will be the mark of true genius.” Indeed,”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“On local city councils being effective: The job of the council is to get together and debate and discuss. But you do it in a way that preserves the relationships so that we can get together next week and do it again.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The political scientist Francis Fukuyama: Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest social group: a family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation. And in all the other groups in between. Where trust is prevalent, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. By contrast, people who do NOT trust one another will end up cooperating only under a formal system of rules and regulations...”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“In Syria, the Obama administration has constantly wrestled with a fiendishly difficult question: Should America and its allies work to take out the murderous Syrian president Bashar al-Assad first—in which case they would lose the support of Iran and Russia and likely introduce even more near-term disorder into Syria? Or should it take out ISIS first—with the tacit support of Iran and Russia—and allow Assad to stay in power, containing total disorder but also crushing the more secular, democratic Syrian opposition? As of the writing of this book, America has not resolved that dilemma.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“When technology enables such a huge leap in the prototyping process, it empowers the designer—who can immediately see all the implications of any idea he or she attempts. At the same time, the process removes so much guessing and therefore so many mistakes, and so much lost time and money. It also invites more experimentation and creativity. And”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“The architect is not just working with a set of drawings but with a data model that understands the whole building as a three-dimensional living system—its windows, air-conditioning, sunlight, lighting, elevators, and how they all interact,” explained Bass. The different teams working on the building can also interact and collaborate, as each change they make is dynamically integrated and optimized against the others. When”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Removing tyrants sometimes does indeed lead to freedom. At other times it merely leads to new kinds of tyranny. Happy the revolution where the revolutionaries are both freedom-loving and effectively organized for the long haul of political struggle.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“And since computing and storage power had exploded in 2007, the capacity to do so was suddenly there. It led IBM to a fundamental insight: “Every time we got rid of a linguist, our accuracy went up,” said Gil. “So now all we use are statistical algorithms” that can compare massive amounts of texts for repeatable patterns. “We have no problem now translating Urdu into Chinese even if no one on our team knows Urdu or Chinese. Now you train through examples.” If you give the computer enough examples of what is right and what is wrong—and in the age of the supernova you can do that to an almost limitless degree—the computer will figure out how to properly weight answers, and learn by doing. And it never has to really learn grammar or Urdu or Chinese—only statistics! That”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” Something”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways. For instance, the invention of the Uber taxi service did all three: it didn’t just create a new competitive taxi fleet; it created a fundamentally new and better way to summon a taxi, to gather data on riders’ needs and desires, to pay for a taxi, and to rate the behavior of the driver and the passenger. These”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“It is the equivalent of a “phase change” in chemistry from a solid to a liquid. What is the feature of something solid? It is full of friction. What is the feature of a liquid? It feels friction-free. When you simultaneously take the friction and complexity out of more and more things and provide interactive one-touch solutions, all kinds of human-to-human and business-to-consumer and business-to-business interactions move from solids to liquids, from slow to fast, from their complexity being a burden and full of friction to their complexity becoming invisible and frictionless. And so whatever you want to move, compute, analyze, or communicate can be done with less effort. As”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“My host, GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the “Git” got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a “distributed version control system” that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. Torvalds’s Git program allowed a team of coders to work together, all using the same files, by letting each programmer build on top of, or alongside, the work of others, while also allowing each to see who made what changes—and to save them, undo them, improve them, and experiment with them.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“Because when we weaken all top-down authority structures and strengthen bottom-up ones; when we create a world with not only superpowers but also super-empowered individuals; when we put so many distant strangers into proximity; when we accelerate the flow of ideas and innovation energy; when we give machines the power to think, alter DNA to remove diseases, and design plants and new materials; when Greeks not paying taxes can undermine bond markets and banks in both Bonn, Germany, and Germantown, Maryland; when a Kosovar hacker in Malaysia can break into the files of an American retailer and sell them to an Al Qaeda operative who can go on Twitter and threaten the U.S. servicemen whose identities were hacked; when all of this is happening at once, we’ve collectively created a world in which what every single person imagines, believes, and aspires to matters more than ever, because they can now act on their imaginations, beliefs,”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“When the Web emerged, companies, led by Yahoo, started to organize it for consumers. Yahoo began as a directory of directories. Anytime someone put up a new website, Yahoo would add it to its directory, and then it started breaking websites down into groups—finance, news, sports, business, entertainment, et cetera. “And then search came along,” said Cutting, “and Web search engines, like AltaVista, started cropping up.”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

“By studying the pattern of footsteps, the farmers were able to gain early detection of eight different cow diseases, enabling early treatment and improving the overall health and longevity of the herd. “A little ingenuity can transform even the oldest of industries like farming,” concluded Sirosh. If”
― Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations