Work is Personal. The Work Matters. I'm in an EMBA program right now, but I view this journey as something that started long before that program, and which will continue long after -- continuous learning, continuous improvement, a "Perpetual MBA".
(Disclaimer: I haven't read The World Is Flat. Everyone raves about it. That makes me skeptical. I will read it when someone loans it to me.)
But as the Hardvard Business Review so eloquently put it, "The World Is Round". The main theme of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat is that worldwide the global playing field is being leveled due to technology (connectivity) and political forces.
Not so fast, says HBR.
The playing field Friedman describes is, of course, level—flattened by the unfettered flow of information. “Bill Gates has a nice line,” Friedman continued. “[Gates] says, 20 years ago, would you rather have been a B-student in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Shanghai? Twenty years ago you’d rather be a B-student in Poughkeepsie. Today?…Not even close. You’d much prefer to be the genius in Shanghai because you can now export your talents anywhere in the world.”
Yes, we are interconnected on a truly astonishing scale. But Gates, Friedman, and many others make a fundamental error when they argue that brute connectivity will level the playing field, giving that twentysomething in Shanghai the ability to compete head-to-head with anyone, anywhere in the world. Their mistake is that they’re confusing information with knowledge. [link]
Their article opens with the idea that in 2005, someone somewhere was the one billionth person to "log on" to the Internet, and that statistically they are most likely to be a 24-year old woman in Shanghai. Access to information is not the great democratizing force, converting information to knowledge is.
The same mentality exists within our borders -- there seems to be this idea that if only America can increase the level of broadband Internet coverage, or get more computers in classrooms, that we will somehow propel more of our population into the Knowledge Economy. But without context and guidance, the torrent of information will not be anything that can be converted to useful knowledge. My expectation is that more people will turn to the net to satisfy America's core competencies: consumerism and entertainment. Unfortunately.
There is enormous potential for both information and knowledge, no doubt, but to assume that knowledge immediately follows access to information is naive.
Tags: HBR, world, flat, friedman, information, knowledge, pmba
