The World is Not Flat
If you have a head on your shoulders and you are using it, you are not -- repeat not -- about to lose your job to an A student in China or India, argues Larry Prusak in a recent issue of Harvard Business Review. He argues that flat earthers such as Tom Friedman -- who think white collar workers in the developed world are in big trouble -- are confusing information with knowledge.
As Prusak puts it, information is that "one dimensional and bounded" stuff -- like an x-ray, a recipe or a powerpoint presentation -- that we are sending every day via email all over the globe. Knowledge, by contrast, "results from the assimilation of and connecting of information through experience, most often through apprenticeship or mentoring. As a result, it becomes embedded in organizations in ways that, so far, have largely evaded codification...And while the cost of obtaining, storing and moving information has plummeted, the cost of doing so with knowledge hasn't dropped much at all..."
Why? Because it still takes virtually the same amount of time to acquire knowledge or learn a skill that it did before the arrival of the Internet. People can't produce a drug, design a new product or provide strategic advice just because they have access to information. As Prusak concludes, "Most of the people in the world remain out of the knowledge loop and off the information grid...But simply giving everyone access to email and Google will never in itself flatten the earth. Until our governments, NGOs, schools, corporations, and other institutions embrace the idea that knowledge -- not information -- is the key to prosperity, most of the world's people will remain a world apart."