Dude, What’s up with Sweden?
A few of you wrote wondering what I was doing in Sweden. No, it’s not a new job, just a twist to the old one. My company merged with a Swedish company. I now have a virtual group that includes people in both St. Paul, MNand Linkoping, Sweden. This was the “kick off” get to know you" trip to figure out the work before the Swedish team goes on summer vacation – for about six weeks. Nice cultural tradition that we Americans will need to learn.

The Triple Convergence
In my last post I said that I had several “convergence” moments. What did I mean by that? In Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat”, he describes the “triple convergence”:

1. The coming together of collaboration technology
2. People’s ability to apply it to change work and life behaviors
3. Along with 300 million new people doing #2 just in developing nations.

My triple convergence was that I was in a foreign country and not able to speak the language, reading an article that said, “there’s this thing called internet”, and programmers in Germany (the company was SAP) were just figuring that employment in Germany was not growing but growing in the Far East. While the first was my weakness, the other two seem so blatantly obvious that I could not believe they would even need mention in a major newspaper like the Financial Times. How was it that so many folks have missed the obvious?

Friedman describes what he calls “the other triple convergence” Those three are:

1. Equating the “dot-com” bust with the end of globalization.
2. 9/11 -- We were concerned about our security, and this is not a time when you “open-up” the borders of your thinking.
3. The 2004 presidential election – Thinking back (and reading many of my posts here), while I tried to be objective about this subject, I do remember thinking this was a political issue.

If there is one thing I take away from reading Friedman's book, it's while globalization affects politics, no amount of politicking will slow the need to respond (and quickly) to what globalization will do to our life, work, and politics.