Word of the Week: Zippies

In 1960th, America had hippies. In 1980th, young urban professionals were dubbed yuppies. Thomas L. Friedman, in his book “The World is Flat,“ introduces zippies.

Who are the zippies?

Zippies are young city or suburban residents, between 15 and 25 years of age. They belong to Generation Z -- people born in a digital world. Zippies can be male or female, studying or working. They exhibit attitude, ambition and aspiration. They are cool, confident and creative. They seek challenge, love risks and shun fears (p.215).

India has 54 percent of population under the age of 25 --that's 55 million people. 6 out of 10 Indian households have at least one zippie.

Think about it -- in several years, many of these zippies will be doing American white-collar jobs for a fraction of the pay...

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Education in the "Flat World"

Bill Gate in his speech before the National Governors Association states: "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow.... In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind."

According to Thomas L. Friedman, the author of a book “The World is Flat,“ our parents were telling us: “Finish your dinner. There are children in China and India who are starving.” Now, we should be warning our children: “Finish your homework. There are students in China and India who want your job.”

Number of American students earning science degrees has fallen to 17th in the world. Science and engineering degrees represent 60% of all B.S. degrees in China, 41% in Taiwan, and 31% in U.S. According to 2004 Trends in International Math and Science Study, 44% of 8th graders in Singapore scored at the most advanced level in math, as did 38% in Taiwan, and only 7% in the U.S.

Bill Gates in his interview with Friedman speculates that thirty years ago, if you had the choice between being born an average person in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Bombay or Shanghai, you'd take Poughkeepsie, because your life opportunities would be so much greater there, even as an average talent. Today, you'd much rather be born a genius in Bombay or Shanghai, because in the flat world you can plug and play, collaborate and connect from anywhere.

Princeton economist Alan Bliner notes, “It is clear that the U.S. and other rich nations will have to transform their educational systems so as to produce workers for the jobs that will actually exist in their societies… In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educated them."

Friedman considers that the most important skills for students in the "flat world" are: learn how to learn, navigation skills, curiosity and passion, a solid foundation in liberal arts, and right brain skills.

1. Learn How to Learn

According to Friedman, the first, and most important, ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to “learn how to learn” – to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new way of doing new things (p.309).

During one of the meeting, a ninth grader asked Friedman: “…how do you learn how to learn? What course should I take?” Friedman suggested the student attending popular teachers classes who could teach students to get excited about learning. “To learn how to learn, you have to love learning—or you have to at least enjoy it—because so much learning is about being motivated to teach yourself. And while it seems that some people are just born with that motivation, many others can develop it or have it implanted with the right teacher (or parent).

2. Navigation

As the world flattens, more information will reside on the Internet. Teaching students how to navigate that virtual world, how to find the real sources of knowledge becomes more important than ever. Students often consider any information on the Internet as a valid source and often use it in their research papers. Some schools forbid students to cite Wikipedia, but Joel Cawley from IBM disagrees with this policy because teachers missing an opportunity to teach their students to navigate and to distinguish between valid sources of information and misinformation (p.313).

3. Curiosity and Passion: CQ + PQ > IQ

IQ is an intelligence quotient, and PQ is curiosity quotient. Friedman writes: "Give me a kid with a passion to learn and a curiosity to discover and I will take him or her over a less passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week. Curious, passionate kids are self-educators and self-motivators. They will always be able to learn how to, especially on the flat-world platform, where you can both download and upload."

"Work matters," said Searls, "but curiosity matters more. Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid."

4. Liberal Arts

Since the new middle jobs require great synthesizing skills, students should be encouraged to think horizontally and connect disparate dots, and, according to Friedman, liberal arts could help students to make connections among history, art, politics, and science.

Steve Jobs shared his story with Stanford University students at a commencement speech. Jobs decided to drop out from the Reed College and started taking classes, which were not required, but interested him. Jobs took a calligraphy class and learned about serif and sans serif typeface, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. After ten years, Jobs used his calligraphy knowledge in designing Macintosh computer fonts. If Jobs didn't take this course, Mac would have never had multiple typeface or proportionally spaced fonts (p.317-318).

5. Right Brain Skills

According to Daniel Pink, the author of "A Whole New Mind," students should learn how "to mesh together different perspectives and disciplines to produce a third thing."

In the new flat world, we have to teach our students right-brain skills "such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challengers instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing s single component," argues Pink.

India is a largest English speaking country in the world with millions of skilled workers who are capable to absorb most computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis jobs. However, the plenty of opportunities remain for less routine work for programmers who can design new systems, accountants who serve as life planners and bankers experts in the art of the deal. Pink argues that "Now the foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the U.S. must do right-brain work better."

One way to nurture the students' right-brain is by encouraging them to do something that they love, because students will learn to bring something intangible into their work, something out of their right brain, which cannot be easily repeated, automated, or outsourced.

We should teach our students how to be a good collaborators, leveragers, adapters, explainers, synthesizers, localizers, and personalizers. These are the most important skills, which help our students to survive the competition and succeed in the "flat world."

References:
Thomas L. Friedman (2007). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Image:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyasusolomon/2094484539/sizes/o/

10 "Flatteners" of the World

On July 24, 2007, Thomas L. Friedman published a further updated and expanded edition of his book “The World is Flat.“ In my next blog, I would like to discuss how “the flat world” affects education system, teachers and students. Today, I'll briefly introduce 10 "flatteners" of the world, in case you have not read this book.

Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, came up with an idea for his book “The World is Flat“ after an interview with Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, in India. They were discussing massive investment into technology which created a platform “where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature…” Nilekani mentioned that “the playing field is being leveled between countries” like India, and that America had better get ready for this. This conversation with Nilekani made Friedman to see clearly that the global competitive playing field was being leveled and inspired him to write a book.

Friedman lists ten "flatteners" of the world:

Flattener #1: 11/9/89

The fall of the Berlin wall.



Flattener #2: 8/9/95

Netscape went public and shifted us from a PC-based platform to an Internet-based platform.

Flattener #3. Work Flow Software

"Work flow platforms are enabling us to do for the service industry what Henry Ford did for manufacturing," said Jerry Rao, the entrepreneur doing accounting work for American from India. "We are taking apart each task, [standartizing it,] and sending it around to whomever can do it best, and because we are doing it in a virtual environment, people need not be physically adjacent to each other, and then we are reassembling all the pieces back together at headquarters [or some other remote site]. This is not a trivial revolution. This is a major one. It allows for a boss to be somewhere and his employees to be someplace else." These work flow software platforms, Jerry added, "enable you to create virtual global offices - not limited by either the boundaries of your office or your country - and to access talent sitting in different parts of the world and have them complete tasks that you need completed in real time. And so 24/7/365 we are all working. And all this has happened in the twinkling of an eye - the span of the last two or three years" (p.91).

For example, Wild Brain is an animation studio in San Francisco that produces films and cartoons for Disney with a team which is spread all around the world: the design and direction is done in San Francisco; the writers work from their homes in Florida, London, new York, Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco; the animation of characters is done in Bangalore; and the recording sessions are held in New York and L.A.

Salesforce.com offers online 590 business tools as email marketing tools, sales analysis tools, and finance tools. Justin Lu, a Shanghai-based businessman is able to sells his organic vitamins and run a $1 million-dollar-revenue generating business from his home with help from salesforce.com business tools.


Flattener #4. Uploading

Community Developed Open-source Software as Apache

Community Developed Answers

Blogging: Uploading News & Commentary

Wikipedia: Community Uploaded Content.

Flattener #5. Outsourcing

The Year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem and the millennium bug, was outsourced oversees because it was cheaper to hire programmers in India. India benefited not only from the dot-com boom (when the cables were laid to India), but also from he dot-com failure (when the cables connect India with the rest of the world).

Many jobs eventually will be outsourced oversees, but I would like to mention here jobs that Friedman calls "untouchables" -- those people whose job won't be outsourced or merged. These "untouchable" jobs are:

1. Special or specialized -- like Michael Jordan, Madonna, Elton John, J.K. Rowling, brain surgeons, the top cancer researchers etc.
2. Localized and anchored -- jobs done at a specific location, involving face-to-face personalized contact or interaction with a customer, client, patient, colleague, or audience -- a barber, waitress, plumber, nurse, dentist, masseurs, repairmen, electrician, gardener, etc. I would add here a teacher.
3. Adaptable -- constantly acquiring new skills that "can make you (at least temporarily) special, specialized, or anchored, and therefore (at least temporarily) untouchable and more likely to reap rising wages" (p.285).


Flattener #6. Offshoring: Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions

"On December 11, 2001, China formally joined the World Trade Organization, which meant Beijing agreed to follow the same global rules governing exports, imports, and foreign investments that most countries were following." (p.137) ASIMCO Technologies – an American auto parts manufacturer in China put the following African proverb, translated in Mandarin, on the factory floor:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter if you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

Ever since China joined the World Trade Organization, both they and the rest of the world have had to run faster and faster.

Facts to think about: the average wage of a high-skilled machinist in America is $3,000-4,000 a month, while the average wage for a factory worker in China is about $150 a month (p.147). America remains the world's biggest manufacturer, producing 75% of what it consumes, though that's down from 90% in the mid-90s (p.150).


Flattener #7. Supply-Chaining: Eating Sushi in Arkansas

Friedman describes the Wal-Mart's supply chain in Bentonvilee, Arkansas -- 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center.


When a consumer picks up one of the products in a Wal-Mart store, the cashier scans it and the generated signal goes to the supplier of that product and pops up on the supplier's computer screen and prompts him to make another of that item and ship it via the Wal-Mark supply chain. Wal-Mart movies 2.3 billion general merchandise cartons a year to its stores.

For example, during hurricane, Florida Wal-Mart stores stock more beer, pop tarts, and kid's games that don't require electricity. Of course, Wal-Mart's ruthless obsession to lower prices has its down sides. For example, Wal-Mart locks overnight workers into its stores, uses illegal immigrants as ganitors, battles the largest civil-rights class-action lawsuit, etc.


Flattener #8. Insourcing: What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing

FedEx and UPS not just delivering packages anymore. They are synchronizing global supply chains large and small (p.167). If you own a Toshiba laptop under warranty, and it breaks and you call Toshiba to have it repaired, it goes to a UPS workshop dedicated to computer repairs at their Louisville hub. UPS also dispatches the drivers and schedules supply pickup and delivery for Papa John’s Pizza.


Flattener #9. In-Forming: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Web Search

Google is now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago. According to Alan Cohen, "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. Google is like God, God is wireless, God is everywhere, and god sees everything. Any questions in the world, ask Google" (p.185).


Flattener #10. The Steroids: Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual

• The first steroid: Computing power. in 1971, the Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2,3000 transistors. Intel's Tianium processor has 1.7 billion transistors in 2006.
  
• The second steroid: Breakthroughs in instant messaging, peer-to-peer networks and file sharing.
  
• The third steroid: Breakthroughs in making phone calls over the Internet (VOIP) -- Skype.
  
• The fourth steroid: Videoconferencing -- people can collaborate, "communicate their thoughts, facial expressions, feelings, ire, enthusiasm, and raised eyebrows."
  
• The fifth steroid: Advances in computer graphics. "Video games are particularly important in this regard, because in addition to their very realistic visual images and great sound, they are highly interactive and increasingly collaborative." (p.194).
  
• The sixth steroid: Wireless technologies and devices. In Japan, you can get uninterrupted wireless internet service on your computer or cell phone while traveling on the bullet train at 150 mph. According to Tamon Mitsuishi, senior VP at DoCoMo, the Japanese cellular giant, " the mobile phone will become the essential controller of a person's life. For example, in the medical field it will be your authentication system and you can examine your medical records, and to make payments you will have to hold a mobile phone. You will not be able to lead a life without a mobile phone, and it will control things at home too. We believe that we need to expand the range of machines that can be controlled by mobile phone."

These steroids made it possible for all forms of collaboration – outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, supply-chaining, and in-forming – to come together. Friedman writes: "As a result of these steroids, engines can now talk to computers, people can talk to people, computers can talk to computers, and people can talk to computers father, faster, more cheaply, and more easily that ever before. And as that has happened, more people from more places have started asking one another the same two question:


CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?


CAN WE WORK TOGETHER NOW?"


References
Thomas L. Friedman (2007) The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

Images
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http://www.learner.org/
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