Learning To Live In The Global Village

#globility

The most important curriculum  in the Industrial Park was "how to earn a living" It did not matter how much you already knew or how much knowledge you could acquire in school. What mattered was the ability to earn a living. Since everyone had the same goal it was not hard to figure out where you could earn the best living. Both small and large businesses in the Industrial Park community were always on the lookout for people willing and able to earn a paycheck by operating machines or managing the workers who did so. This did not require much knowledge or complex reasoning--just physical strength, dexterity and a good work ethic. When mathematical or verbal skills were required, then a high school diploma was sufficient to gain access. The rest was conveyed On-The-Job by a Foreman or Supervisor who had learned the job the same way. In many cases, the company CEO had come up through the ranks this way.

It is not like that in the Global Village.  Here, life is more about learning how to live than learning how to earn a living. There are no bars to entry in the Global Village. Anyone is welcome to live here regardless of their mental acuity or physical dexterity. There is a global need for just about every skill and every cache of actionable knowledge that sustained the Industrial Park. However, this need is not concentrated in a local community nor is it actively acquired by designated business entities. For example, the ability to analyze data and annotate trends may not have much value on the streets of  Bangladesh, but can buy a comfortable living using the WWW. 

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

The biggest obstacle to living well in the Global Village is finding buyers for your products or services. The buyers are generally strangers whose work ethic and cultural values are a total mismatch to the sellers they seek. In the Industrial Park, that would be a show stopper. In the Global Village it is mostly an inconvenience. Language barriers are easily bridged by Applications that provide instantaneous translation. Currency issues are bridged using virtual value that can move from the buyer's account to the seller's account at the speed of thought. There is no problem with cyber-security because false claims can be traced and corrected faster than a cyber thief can execute them. Those whose only motive is to terrorize residents of the Global Village are simply cut off the Web and isolated. Their ability to purchase products is limited to food and shelter which may be provided as welfare to ensure no access to the Web is needed to sustain their life. 

It may take several decades to learn to live in the Global Village, but given the technical advantage residency offers in this Knowledge Age, the new way of living is likely to endure many centuries.

ADDENDUM 2020
A white paper launched jointly in 2014 by CBRE and Genesis, a leading real estate innovator, developer and operator from China puts this in perspective. The paper—Fast Forward 2030: The Future of Work and the Workplace articulates some of the changes that will challenge those who must transition from the Industrial Park to the Global Village in coming years:

“Experts predict that 50% of occupations today will no longer exist by 2025 as people will take up more creative professions. This means that jobs will evolve and so will real estate development. Through this report, we are looking to better understand how we can create new high-performance, convenient workspaces that are not only aesthetically pleasing, but are also in line with the social values of the workforce of the future."

The key findings of the report were as follows:

1. Artificial intelligence will transform businesses and the work that people do

• Process work, customer work and vast swathes of middle management will simply disappear: 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025
• New jobs will require creative intelligence, social and emotional intelligence and the ability to leverage artificial intelligence. Those jobs will be immensely more fulfilling than today’s jobs
• Workspaces with row of desks as we know them today will be completely redundant. Not because they are not fit for purpose, but simply because that purpose no longer exists.

2. For employees, purpose is more important than financial success

• There is a significant and global trend amongst all people, but particularly the youth, towards happiness, purpose and meaning being as or more important than financial success
• Corporations will not only need to be lean and agile they must be authentic to attract talent: authentic in their values and in making a real contribution to the social good
• As the nature of work changes we expect to see more social entrepreneurship
  
  Young people interviewed for the report clearly indicated that the workplaces of 2030 will contrast starkly to the workplaces of today and will offer a wide variety of quiet retreat and collaborative settings, each ideal for a specific kind of job or task or designed to suit a specific personal work style. In particular, young interviewees suggested that workplaces of the future will need to support worker health and wellbeing—as did all industry experts and business leaders interviewed for the study. The budding industry of wellness in buildings will grow rapidly in the coming decade.

    

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