In today’s world of chaos, we can optimistically find ways to personally thrive and enable our organizations to maintain momentum in the midst of this chaos. Thank You For Being Late can arm everyone with the tools to overcome adversity and grow in the face of adversity. Thomas Friedman provides solutions leading to the discovery of innovative resources in a resource-constrained environment. Thomas Friedman does an excellent job explaining the exponential growth that has occurred with the introduction of the internet, Artificial Intelligence, great innovative thinkers, and the ability to ensure diversity and inclusion are at the forefront. Reflecting on what we see today with politics and society, we can clearly see where our political leaders are failing and how the community follows like a herd of blind sheep. Chapter 12 “Always Looking for Minnesota” rings very true when looking at today’s political problems. Minnesota’s social capital approach and politicians’ love for the country over their hatred for their opponents made the community flourish in the 70-80s. Today jobs are being lost, government policies cause strain on the working class requiring a look for innovative solutions to maintain support within their communities. By learning from the examples Friedman shares in this book and applying them to today’s variables, change can be made. This book lays out the recipe. We need to contemplate its application and include it in our ecological development.
Key Take-Aways
- Diversity, inclusion, and the focus on what’s right for the country will bring the country back on track and focus on what is good for the country, enabling innovative acceleration.
- Taking time to pause and reflect enables the connecting of ideas leading to innovative solutions.
- The lifelong learners will be the most successful in this day in age as they continue to expose their minds to innovative solutions required to maintain acceleration along the path the world is traveling today and in the future.
- Group collaboration through systems such as GitHub can capture innovative ideas through the community and rapidly accelerate an organization and community’s improvement.
- Rapid innovative solutions can be found through integration with existing systems, for example, building an API to access Google Maps rather than making your own mapping system when developing an app.
- The lack of diversity hinders innovation, the more diverse the team, the more innovative ideas produced.
- Diversity and Inclusion must achieve the right balance as to no exclude the majority while attempting to include the minority.
- Those who learn to utilize AI more effectively are the future advanced innovators; AI has no heart or soul, humans who know how to use AI effectively will be in high demand in the future.
- Changing a culture requires a leader who does what’s right for the country rather than supports their constituents.
I really enjoyed this book. Each chapter continued to inform my daily reflection into the problems I focus on at work, family life, and society’s ills of today. The systems and tools described in this book can be applied in everything we do. If you use deep reflective thought, you can determine what effort can be best applied within your life. This book is a great example of my philosophy of exposing yourself to literature where you disagree with the author’s bias, values, and beliefs. When we choose to allow our bias to shut down our ability to learn, we miss out on learning opportunities, dialectical development, and the discovery of innovative solutions that have been beyond our perceptual view. You can feel Friedman’s bias in this book. As a conservative, my emotions and thoughts are influenced to identify these biases quickly. My bias finds his bias. Yet, I do not let this distract my mind from learning and applying the multiple brilliant ideas and solutions found in this book. I grew from this book, and you will too.