Instead of packing

Instead of packing for a 7 day marathon trip, I've decided to procrastinate just a bit longer, by writing about the future of work. Wherever I go, it seems like everybody is talking about The World is Flat. Although the hype is dying down a little bit, it semed like every meeting I attended, every policy student, and every garden variety news magazine was either hyping it as the second coming, or trashing it for being inexplicably redundant. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, but there was something that caught my eye.

In describing the worker of the future, Friedman mentions four categories of people who should do okay in the new millenium. Everybody else is pretty much fucked. Your job will be in either India, China, or Eastern Europe in 20 years. The four categories are:

1. Special - Workers who are special are people like Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, and Barbra Streisand. They have a global market for their goods and services and command global-sized pay packages. Their jobs can never be outsourced.
2. Specialized - Lawyers, Accountnts, and brain surgeons. Their skills are in high demand and are not fungible (substitutable).
   
3. Anchored - Jobs that must be done in a specific location, involving face-to-face contact with a customer, client, patient, or audience (barbers, chefs, plumbers, nurses, electircians, cleaning folks, etc.)
4. Adaptable - Friedman, says this is the category you really don't want to be in. But if you can't get the first three, this one will work (albeit barely). "You want to constantly acquire new skills, knowledge, and expertise that enable you to constantly create value... Being adapatable in a flat world, knowing how to "learn how to learn, " will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, and innovation will happen faster". Guess what category generalists are in?