The Untouchables: Finding the New Middle Date:   Tuesday , November 28, 2006 In Globalization 1.0, countries had to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. In Globalization 2.0, companies had to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. In Globalization 3.0, individuals have to think globally to thrive, or at least survive. This requires not only a new level of technical skills but also a certain mental flexibility, self-motivation, and psychological mobility. Each of us, as an individual, will have to work a little harder and run a little faster to keep our standard of living rising. In the flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides. The key to thriving, as an individual, in a flat world is figuring out how to make yourself an “untouchable.” “Untouchables” in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced, digitized or automated. And they fall into three broad categories: First are people who are really “special or specialized,” like Michael Jackson or Madonna. Second are people who are really “localized” and “anchored,” like the many, many people whose jobs must be done in a specific location like gardeners, electricians et al. The third category includes people in many formerly middle class jobs—from assembly line work to data entry to security analyst to certain form of accounting and radiology—that were once deemed nonfungible or nontradable and are now being made fungible and tradable. What will be the jobs of the new middle, and what skills will they be based on? In the United States, new middle jobs are coming into being all the time; that is why we don’t have large-scale unemployment, despite the fattening of the world. But to get and keep these new middle jobs you need certain skills that are suited to the flat world-skills that can make you, at least temporarily, special, specialized, or anchored, and therefore, at least temporarily, an untouchable. In the new middle, we are all temps now. The new middlers What are those skills? In order to answer this question, I worked backward. I went out to successful flat-world companies around America and asked a simple question: “Obviously you have a lot of good middle-class jobs here. Who works here and what sorts of things do they do?” What follows is a general list of categories that many new middle jobs will fall into, or grow out of, and the skill sets they require. To put it in another way, here is what the “Help Wanted” ads look like in the flat world. Great Collaborators and orchestrators Clearly, a lot of new middle jobs will involve collaborating with others or orchestrating collaboration within and between companies, especially those employing diverse workforces from around the world. So as more and more companies start out, from day one, as global companies with global supply chains, a key new middle job will be that of the manager who can work in and orchestrate 24/7/7 supply chains—which are supply chains that run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, across seven continents. The great synthesizers The further we push out the boundaries of knowledge and innovation, the more the next great value breakthroughs—that is, the next new hot-selling products and services—will come from putting together disparate things that you would not think of as going together. Search engine optimizing, for example, brings together mathematicians and marketing experts. The next great breakthrough in bioscience is going to result from computer engineers who can map the human genome working with pharma companies that can turn these insights into life-saving drugs. This synthesis is where the new jobs are going to emerge. The great explainers The more we have good synthesizers, who can bring disparate things together, the more we will need managers, writers, teachers, producers, journalists, and editors who are also good explainers—who can see the complexity but explain it with simplicity. The great leveragers It’s all about combining the best of what computers can do with the best of what humans can do, and then constantly reintegrating the new best practices the humans are innovating back into the system to make the whole—the machines and the people—that much more productive. There are lots of new middle jobs in that loop. The great adapters The Gartner Group, the technology consultants, coined a term to describe the trend in the information technology world away from specialization and toward employees who are more adaptable and versatile. It calls them “Versatilists.” Building employee versatility and finding employees who already are or are willing to become versatilists “Will be the new watchword for career planning,” according to a Gartner study quoted by TechRepublic.com. The Gartner study noted “specialists generally have deep skills and narrow scope, giving them expertise that is recognized by peers but seldom valued outside their immediate domain. Generalists have broad scope and shallow skills, enabling them to respond or act reasonably quickly but often without gaining or demonstrating the confidence of their partners or customers. Versatilists, in contrast, apply depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and assuming new roles.” Versatilists are capable not only of constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing. Let’s face it; my kids have very little chance of working for the same company for twenty-five years, as I have. They have got to be adaptable. The green people When three billion people from China, India, and the former Soviet Empire walk onto the flat-world platform in a very short period of time, and every one of them wants a house, a car, a microwave, and a refrigerator, if we don’t learn how to do more things with less energy and fewer emissions, we are going to create an environmental disaster and make our planet unlivable for our children. So there are going to be a lot of jobs involving the words “sustainable” and “renewable”—renewable energies and environmentally sustainable systems. This is going to be a huge industry in the twenty-first century. The great localizers While big business is certainly important for creating middle-class jobs, the fact is that small and medium-size businesses really do the majority of hiring and firing. When those small and medium-size businesses are growing and hiring people, the economy is robust, and when they are not, it is in recession. So, if there is to be a new middle, small and medium-size businesses must play key roles. Those who are successful at this (localization) will understand the emerging global infrastructure, and then adapt all the new tools it offers to local needs and demands. This is going to create a lot of new middle jobs.