It's All Goran's Fault
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Goran Matijasevic is a Prof at UCI. He invites the community to sit in on his classes on entrepreneurship. It's a pretty cool class in that it seems that most of the students are at the graduate level, many of them PhD candidates. It's fun to watch for what they listen to, or don't listen to, as the case may be. He has a speaker, normally a CEO or C-level executive, every class. On the surface, the ones who garner the most attention have the coolest jobs. The coolest jobs aren't necessarily the ones you might think. Interestingly, the speaker who generated the most interest was a the President of NPI Services, Inc., Judy Greenspon. Not only is she a cool person (Peace Corps professional, entrepreneur, traveler, successful business woman) she runs an interesting company that makes prototype circuit boards for every major company in the high tech arena. Pretty cool. Just don't get her mad.
She was incensed that no one in the room had read The World Is Flat. Since I hadn't either, I couldn't smile smugly. So I got the book and have started to read it. It's thick, It's heavy. But it is a very good read.
After reading much of the book and reflecting a bit, I realize that Goran's students really don't need to read Friedman's book because they are the book. The basic premise is that the world is now a level playing field - it is flat. Opportunities abound all over the world, ripe for taking advantage of. When people in Goran's class ask questions, sometimes the speakers don't understand their accents. That's because they're from all over the world. They understand flatness because they are taking advantage of it. Also, what PhD candidate has had the time in the last four or so years (the book came out in 2005) to leisurely read a six hundred page book. These students certainly haven't. They've been publishing so they won't perish. That's my bet.
There is an economic development challenge here. In the past, we relied on the fact that students, first, wanted to come to America to study, and, second, that after they finished their studies, they would stay to staff our high technology companies. There's a breakdown going on here. Some of it is caused by the restrictions placed on immigration by 9/11. Some students aren't coming. Others are going home when they can't get a visa to stay.
Disaster for America? I don't know. I did like President Obama's comments last evening (24 February 2009) in his speech to Congress about increasing the number of technology graduates in American universities to a level above that of any other nation - a huge, go-to-the-moon-like goal that feels good when you think about it. It's a good start.
I do know this much: I have enjoyed Goran's class and every one of the students I have been learning with. They're pretty cool. So is our flat world. It's all Goran's fault that I read this book. I am glad I did.
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2005.