[OKC] Gaylor Prize winnger urges innovation

[Shauna Struby]

Gaylord Prize winner urges innovation


by M. Scott Carter
The Journal Record December 8, 2009


OKLAHOMA CITY - For New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, the world
is flat - and it is getting flatter.


Speaking Monday during a ceremony that presented him with the second Gaylord
Prize, Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, said he was
wrong in his 2004 book, The World is Flat. 

"The world has really changed quite a bit," he said. "And, quite honestly, I
got it wrong. The world is so much flatter than I thought. Who knew that
Iceland had turned itself into a hedge fund with glaciers, which we
discovered during the last economic crisis?"

 

Globalization has changed the way the world conducts everything from
business to foreign policy, he told a capacity crowd at the Sheraton Hotel.

"A few years ago, the first time, it all hit me," Friedman said. "It was
more important to know what General Motors and General Electric thought than
General Powell."

He said more and more things are becoming commodities.

 

"More and more things are becoming automated, digitized, sensitized and
outsourced," he said. "And the only thing that remains, that cannot become a
commodity, is now more important than ever - the imagination."

 

Speaking to the students in his audience, Friedman urged them to act on
their ideas.

 

Full article here ::: http://www.journalrecord.com/article.cfm?recid=105045

 

Shauna, OKC

 

 

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