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A lot of people have grown up with access to all sorts of information, from Buddha through to how to assemble a nuclear bomb They have their own digital personalities They are impatient They are much less loyal They often choose different names to hide themselves. And big business has not yet become used to this."It is not just business. Friedman worries that America does not understand the technological revolution that, up till now, it has led. "We have a government which is catering for people who think that intelligent design came from God not Intel."Patel worries that the US reaction to the new world order is to put up barriers to the free trade it has traditionally championed "Protectionist voices are rising within the US," he argues. "The next advance in bioscience will come from some Romanian 15-year-old who has downloaded the map of the human genome," argues Friedman.Patel believes that IT is changing consumption patterns radically. "There is a complete lack of leadership on the positive side.
The US has the best universities in the world, the best capital markets, the best rule of law, the best patent protection. Yet we are threatening to lose a free-trade agreement with Central America."In a world where the whole sum of human knowledge is downloaded on to the internet and can be accessed in microseconds using Google, and where mobile phone makers will soon have a simple internet-ready cellphone for sale at around $25, more information than our parents could find in a lifetime will shortly be available from a device in your pocket. And this process, which he calls "flattening", has enabled one-man bands to compete with massive multinationals, completely changing business models and putting jobs at risk in traditional economic powerhouses such as the US and Europe.Meeting readers, he has detected a mood, particularly in the US, which has not been there before "Fear is too strong a word," he says. "There is an undertow of angst that there is something going on in the world that is challenging them on jobs, education and competition."Outsourcing, most noticeably in IT and the financial services sector, is such big news in the US that it became an election issue, with the Democrats in particular being "weak at the knees", according to Friedman. The war with communism was over and US-style democratic capitalism was the standard. But in the first four years of this century, so many things have changed."These have included the exponential growth of China and India, the uncertainties caused by the end of the dot-com boom, the crisis in American corporations triggered by the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Having spent the past few years "travelling round the world talking to the top 150 CEOs", Patel has come to the belief that: "The world is changing yet many business people are still clinging on to the old themes of price, cost and business process re-engineering."Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author on global affairs, is in the midst of a book tour promoting his best-selling work The World Is Flat. The book argues that technological advances, in particular, have levelled the business playing field so that "you can work from north London, North Dakota or north Bangalore". "We finished the last century with a quite clear idea of how the world was. The Treasury is resistant because it would be complex, but transport ministers have favoured the idea.. Of the 15 countries committed to meeting this target, the UK is the fourth-worst - an honour shared with the Netherlands - on emissions. Based on 2002 figures, only Sweden, Finland and Germany are worse.Tony Blair admitted last December that the Government was likely to break its promise to cut the UK's CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2010, and would be lucky to reach 14 per cent.
