communication skills assignment

1. THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE
BY:- NAKUL CHANPURA 17BCL012
NISARG JAIN 17BCL030
RAHIL JANI 17BCL032
DEVARSH SHAH 17BCL094

2. Thank You for Being Late: is Thomas Friedman's best book yet.
Friedman combines his breathless optimism and journalistic
personal style with a much more advanced critique of
globalization than in his earlier books. He emphasizes how the
combination of technology and market-based policies launched
by Britain's Margaret Thatcher and USA President Ronald
Reagan in the 1980's drove today's increasing acceleration of
global change.
These rates of change naturally affect people across countries in
different but generally unsettling ways. Systems thinkers as far
back as the 1960's including in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1965)
understood these accelerating changes as caused by
interlinkages and positive feedback loops. The Ad Hoc Committee
on the Triple Revolution in the 1960's identified such changes in
technology, automation, structural unemployment as requiring a
similar speed-up of social and policy adaptation including
proposals for universal basic incomes. In 1974, the US Congress
launched its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) on which I
served, to help policy makers anticipate these technological
changes.

3. Friedman while retaining his market-based corporate-focused
view of these technologically-driven global restructuring
processes, steps back in this book and calls for independence
from this fast-paced daily whirlwind speeding our lives. He gets
more philosophical---calling for patience, wisdom and recalling on
deeper values of community, empathy and trust. Friedman's title
Thank You for Being Late, refers to his personal experiences of
waiting for his interviewees to arrive at his favorite restaurant due
to unusual traffic delays. As his anxiety and irritation began to
give way to periods of reflection, Friedman greeted the
latecomers by thanking them for being late.
This book races through Friedman's readable explanations of
today's exponentials driving technological advantage in digital
power, Moore's Law and sensors, as the three eras of computing:
1) Tabulating Era, 2) Programing Era and, 3) Cognitive Era. He
covers his interviews with reports from key experts from Google
(GOOG), Intel (INTC), Hadoop, Autodesk (ADSK), General Electric
(GE), International Business Machine (IBM) and the innovations of
the so-called "shareconomy" AirBnB, Uber and their ways of
organizing trust. These are learned from reputation ratings
pioneered by eBay (EBAY) and sharing pioneered by Linus
Torvald, Jimmy Wales and other founders of the open-source
movement. Friedman spends less attention on the Blockchain
Revolution as Don and Alex Tapsott and the monetary changes
disrupting legacy banking and finance I describe in "Fintech: Good
and Bad News for Sustainable Finance" and the reports on The
Financial System We Need by Simon Zadek and Nick Robins for
the UNEP Inquiry on the Design of Sustainable Finance
www.unepinquiry.org

4. Friedman spends much attention describing the global changes
driven by human activities on the Earth's climate, loss of
biodiversity and growing threats to our environment and its life-
support systems. He cites the best teachers, including ecologists
Tom Lovejoy and Jorgen Randers, physics and green energy
expert Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, agronomist
Wes Jackson, restoring prairies' species and diversity at the Land
Institute in Kansas and the paradigm shifting work of Janine
Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute and her consulting firm
Biomimicry 3.8. (full disclosure: I am an early investor), as well as
the late systems dynamics expert Dana Meadows, lead researcher
in "The Limits to Growth" (1972).

5. Friedman misses the ongoing expression of the deeper values
embedded in the global dominance of cooperative enterprises
which employ more people on this planet than all the for-profit
companies combined (see the UN's Year of Cooperatives. 2012)
also described in "Values": How to Bring Values to Life in Your
Business by Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Britain's famous
Cooperatives UK. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs) ratified by 195 member countries, as well as their National
Development Commitments (NDCs) are committed to shift from
fossil fuels to low-carbon economies. I described this paradigm
shift underway in "Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar
Age", Forward by NASA Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell as "From
Economism to Earth Systems Science".

6. Friedman's conclusions: today's technological revolutions
are vast enough to be termed beyond "the cloud" to his
description as "the supernova". He correctly cites the lag in
social and political innovations which must now be
overcome by such units as OTA, still copied in many other
countries but shut down in the USA in 1996. Many obsolete
political parties, health and educational systems, tax and
trade policies need overhauling today, as Friedman
describes.
To restore lost trust in current institutions, Friedman ends
with recalling his childhood in Minnesota with its inclusive
humanity and the community responsibility of its civic and
business leaders in such innovative groups as The Itasca
Project. I recall being an early presenter at their first
meeting at Lake Itasca along with radical economist
Michael Harrington who explored the roots of poverty and
exclusion in the US economy which burst forth in our 2016
elections.
This book is full of new information and insights and a
surprisingly good read as well.