Tom Friedman’s Five Rules for Surviving our New Economy

Greetings from the New Economy
Greetings from the New Economy

From The Wall Street Journals article, Radically Open: Tom Friedman On the Future of Work,Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times and author of seven best-selling books, has these five rules:

  1. Always think like an immigrant. Because we’re all new immigrants to the age of accelerations.
  2. Always think like an artisan. Always do your job in a way that you bring so much empathy to it, so much unique, personal value-add that it cannot be automated, digitized, or outsourced, and you want to carve your initials into it at the end of the day.
  3. Always be in beta. Always think of yourself as if you need to be re-engineered, retooled, relearned, and retaught constantly. Never think of yourself as finished—otherwise, you really will be finished.
  4. Always remember that PQ (passion quotient) plus CQ (curiosity quotient) is greater than IQ (intelligence quotient). Give me a young person with a high PQ and a high CQ, and I will take that person over a kid with a high IQ seven days a week.
  5. Always think entrepreneurially. Always think, “Where can I fork off and start a new company over here, a new business over there?” Because a huge manufacturing company is not coming to your town with a 25,000-person factory. That factory is now 2,500 robots and 500 people. So we need three people starting jobs for six; six people starting jobs for 12; 12 people starting jobs for 20. That’s how we’re going to get all those jobs. We need everyone thinking entrepreneurially.