The+Untouchables

The people who are going to thrive in the flat world are going to be those who can adapt to the new technologies. This presents new problems for the middle class. The flattening of the world no longer allows those who are mediocre at their job to succeed as they have in the past. There will obviously still be what Friedman calls the "untouchables," middle class workers who are relied upon by their location, chefs, plumbers, nurses, repairmen, etc. But the Middle Classers who can be easily replaced, data entry, assembly line work, will have to compete with the same middle classers overseas and will suffer because of it. Collaboration is one that is needed to succeed in the new world. People Friedman calls "The great Synthesizers," like Search Engine optimizers will have the skills to succeed in the flat world.

Then you got the 'Great Explainers,' people who form business around explaining and teaching how to use the latests technologies. This then leads to the 'Great Leveragers,' who see a problem, use a standard protocol, and fix that problem forever - reinventing computer systems, eliminating the inefficieny gaps between technology and humans. These both are untouchables. The Great Adapters are different in that, in the past you had people either specialists (trained in one field) or generalists (not well trained, but has braod abilities.) Now there will be 'Versatilists,' people who are very well trained at very many things, that can change jobs easily, learn new abilities and be capable assets to employers.

The Passionate Personalizers: Lemonade stand example - people who take a "vanilla job" and add their own spice to attract customers. The Great Localizers: "localizing the global" - more business for small and medium size firms who can take global capablities and tailor them to local needs (sports bar owner example) modeling - using new technology to bring data together in new ways, which saves the time and effort of actually building or going into those ideas. Climbing technology's knowledge ladder makes many professions much easier, including Greer's artist job (can upload sketches and color them on the computer). This opened up an entire new market for him in morphs (cartoon strips where ones character evolves into another) for magazines. He used his new knowledge of technology to turn his vanilla job into a "special chocolate sauce," and he added the "cherry" with the addition of morphs.