- The document summarizes Thomas L. Friedman's book "Thank You For Being Late", which discusses how technology, globalization, climate change, and biodiversity loss have transformed the modern world at an accelerating pace. - Friedman interviews experts from companies like Google and Intel to understand the exponential technological changes driving three eras of computing. - While acknowledging the market-driven forces of globalization, Friedman calls for pausing to appreciate this era of change and ensuring social and policy innovations can keep up with technological disruptions.

1. THANKYOU FOR
BEING LATE
AUTHOR: THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Reviewed by:
Jay Lakhani (17BCH015)
Brijesh Khunt (17BCH018)
Salat Atualkumar (17BCH041)

2. • TITLE: THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN.
• Preface or Introduction:
• Thank You for Being Late is a work of concurrent history that serves as a field manual for how to think,
talk, and write about this era of accelerations. It also stands as an argument for "being late", for
pausing and appreciating this historical era we're passing through and reflecting on the dangers and
possibilities of our choices that effects our world on am unimaginable scale.
• The central theme of the book is: The world is speeding up - and that’s okay, as long as we all keep
moving ourselves. Friedman compares thriving in today’s world to riding a bicycle: a bike is steady,
upright and comfortable when you are moving; stop moving and you topple over!
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3. • 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
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.

4. • In Thank You For Being Late, the author shows that how the 21st century was impacted by
technology, globalization, climate change and biodiversity loss. These factors played a
major role in transforming workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics and the community.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

5. • 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
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.

6. • 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).
• 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".
• Friedman's conclusions: today's technological revolutions are vast enough to be termed beyond "the
cloud" to his description as "the supernova".
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7. • 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.

8. Thank
You