Thomas Friedman - The World is Flat

So if the flattening of the world is largely (but not entirely) unstoppable, and holds out the potential to be as beneficial to American society as a whole as past market evolutions have been, how does an individual get the best out of it? What do we tell our kids?

There is only one message: You have to constantly upgrade your skills. There will be plenty of good jobs out there in the flat world for people with the knowledge and ideas to seize them.

I am not suggesting this will be simple. It will not be. There will be a lot of other people out there also trying to get smarter. It was never good to be mediocre in your job, but in a world of walls, mediocrity could still earn you a decent wage. In a flatter world, you really do not want to be mediocre. You don't want to find yourself in the shoes of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, when his son Biff dispels his idea that the Loman family is special by declaring, “Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!” An angry Willy retorts, “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!”

I don't care to have that conversation with my girls, so my advice to them in this flat world is very brief and very blunt: “Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ”Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.“ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework-people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”

The way I like to think about this for our society as a whole is that every person should figure out how to make himself or herself into an untouchable. That's right. When the world goes flat, the caste system gets turned upside down. In India untouchables may be the lowest social class, but in a flat world everyone should want to be an untouchable. Untouchables, in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced.

So who are the untouchables, and how do you or your kids get to be one? Untouchables come in four broad categories: workers who are “special,” workers who are “specialized,” workers who are “anchored,” and workers who are “really adaptable.”

Workers who are special are people like Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, and Barbra Streisand. They have a global market for their goods and services and can command global-sized pay packages. Their jobs can never be outsourced.

If you can't be special-and only a few people can be-you want to be specialized, so that your work cannot be outsourced. This applies to all sorts of knowledge workers-from specialized lawyers, accountants, and brain surgeons, to cutting-edge computer architects and software engineers, to advanced machine tool and robot operators. These are skills that are always in high demand and are not fungible. (“Fungible” is an important word to remember. As Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani likes to say, in a flat world there is “fungible and nonfungible work.” Work that can be easily digitized and transferred to lower-wage locations is fungible. Work that cannot be digitized or easily substituted is nonfungible. Michael Jordan's jump shot is nonfungible. A bypass surgeon's technique is nonfungible. A television assembly-line worker's job is now fungible. Basic accounting and tax preparation are now fungible.)

If you cannot be special or specialized, you want to be anchored. That status applies to most Americans, everyone from my barber, to the waitress at lunch, to the chefs in the kitchen, to the plumber, to nurses, to many doctors, many lawyers, entertainers, electricians, and cleaning ladies. Their jobs are simply anchored and always will be, because they must be done in a specific location, involving face-to-face contact with a customer, client, patient, or audience. These jobs generally cannot be digitized and are not fungible, and the market wage is set according to the local market conditions. But be advised: There are fungible parts of even anchored jobs, and they can and will be outsourced-either to India or to the past-for greater efficiency. (Yes, as David Rothkopf notes, more jobs are actually “outsourced to the past,” thanks to new innovations, than are outsourced to India.) For instance, you are not going to go to Bangalore to find an internist or a divorce lawyer, but your divorce lawyer may one day use a legal aide in Bangalore for basic research or to write up vanilla legal documents, and your internist may use a nighthawk radiologist in Bangalore to read your CAT scan.

This is why if you cannot be special or specialized, you don't want to count on being anchored so you won't be outsourced. You actually want to become really adaptable. You want constantly to acquire new skills, knowledge, and expertise that enable you constantly to be able to create value-something more than vanilla ice cream. You want to learn how to make the latest chocolate sauce, the whipped cream, or the cherries on top, or to deliver it as a belly dancer-in whatever your field of endeavor. As parts of your work become commoditized and fungible, or turned into vanilla, adaptable people will always learn how to make some other part of the sundae. Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to “learn how to learn,” will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster.

Atul Vashistha, CEO of NeoIT, a California consulting firm that specializes in helping U.S. firms do outsourcing, has a good feel for this: “What you can do and how you can adapt and how you can leverage all the experience and knowledge you have when the world goes flat-that is the basic component [for survival]. When you are changing jobs a lot, and when your job environment is changing a lot, being adaptable is the number one thing. The people who are losing out are those with solid technical skills who have not grown those skills. You have to be skillfully adaptable and socially adaptable.”

The more we push out the boundaries of knowledge and technology, the more complex tasks that machines can do, the more those with specialized education, or the ability to learn how to learn, will be in demand, and for better pay. And the more those without that ability will be less generously compensated. What you don't want to be is a not very special, not very specialized, not very anchored, or not very adaptable person in a fungible job. If you are in the low-margin, fungible end of the work food chain, where businesses have an incentive to outsource to lower-cost, equally efficient producers, there is a much greater chance that your job will be outsourced or your wages depressed.

“If you are a Web programmer and are still using only HTML and have not expanded your skill set to include newer and creative technologies, such as XML and multimedia, your value to the organization gets diminished every year,” added Vashistha. New technologies get introduced that increase complexity but improve results, and as long as a programmer embraces these and keeps abreast of what clients are looking for, his or her job gets hard to outsource. “While technology advances make last year's work a commodity,” said Vashistha, “reskilling, continual professional education and client intimacy to develop new relationships keeps him or her ahead of the commodity curve and away from a potential offshore.'”

My childhood friend Bill Greer is a good example of a person who faced this challenge and came up with a personal strategy to meet it. Greer is forty-eight years old and has made his living as a freelance artist and graphic designer for twenty-six years. From the late 1970s until right around 2000, the way Bill did his job and served his clients was pretty much the same.

“Clients, like The New York Times, would want a finished piece of artwork,” Bill explained to me. So if he was doing an illustration for a newspaper or a magazine, or proposing a new logo for a product, he would actually create a piece of art-sketch it, color it, mount it on an illustration board, cover it with tissue, put it in a package that was opened with two flaps, and have it delivered by messenger or FedEx. He called it “flap art.” In the industry it was known as “camera-ready art,” because it needed to be shot, printed on four different layers of color film, or “separations,” and prepared for publication. “It was a finished product, and it had a certain preciousness to it,” said Bill. “It was a real piece of art, and sometimes people would hang them on their walls. In fact, The New York Times would have shows of works that were created by illustrators for its publications.”