Thomas L. Friedman - Thank you for being late: an optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations

Thomas L. Friedman is a three-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his work with The New York Times and is the author of six bestselling books, including The World Is Flat . You can sign up for email updates here.

So many people were generous in sharing their time and insights to make my writing this book possible. I want to do my best to acknowledge each of them.

First and foremost, I need toonce againthank the New York Times chairman and publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Andy Rosenthal, the editorial page editor when I was working on this book, for allowing me to cut my column-writing duties in half in order to do all the research and interviews that were the foundation for this work. It would not have been possible otherwise. I joined The New York Times in 1981. It remains the greatest newspaper in the world, and my many and varied assignments there have given me a front-row seat to so much history and the opportunity to travel and learn in so many different settings. I am forever indebted to Arthur and his late father, Arthur Ochs Punch Sulzberger, for affording me that opportunity for nearly four decades.

I have been fortunate over my career to have developed a small group of friends who are the most amazing posse one could partner with to toss up ideas, bat them back and forth, sharpen them, and eventually bring them to a point where they can form the spine of a book. While I have dedicated this book to all of them, this particular book benefited in some specific ways that demand extra acknowledgment.

No one was more generous with his time, insights, and encouragement in helping me assemble this book than my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, the CEO of LRN and the author of the book How. Dov is a truly unique observer of the human condition, and I have learned so much from him about people and organizations and values, which is why he is quoted more than anyone else in this book. But his influence in shaping my thinking goes well beyond those quotes. Ideas that Dov first articulated through our endless walks and talks are suffused throughout this book. Lucky is the person who has Dov Seidman for a friend.

Once again, my teacher and friend Craig Mundie, the former senior executive at Microsoft and now an executive coach, stepped up to guide me through the latest generation of technology and make sure that I not only understood it well enough to explain it, but also, better yet, could explain it accurately! This is the fourth book of mine that Craig has helped with. To have Craig Mundie as your technology tutor is to have Babe Ruth as your batting coach.

Speaking of longtime tutors, this is the seventh book to which my friend Michael Sandel has contributed his insights, but this one was particularly fun, since he was present at the creation back in Minnesota when we were young boys in the same Hebrew school class. Michaels thoughts on the civic virtues that enrich and are enriched by a healthy community were particularly valuable.

Michael Mandelbaum, my coauthor on my last book and almost daily partner in chewing over the news and trying to understand it, has been sharing his ideas with me and sharpening my own for more than two decades. He listened to the reporting that went into this book, as he has for five previous ones, and always generously helped me think through the ideas.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age , had a big impact on my thinking as well, as I note in the book, and generously shared their insights with me.

And, of course, a heartfelt thanks goes to Ayele Bojia, the parking attendant at the underground public parking garage in Bethesda, Maryland, whose stopping me to ask about how to improve his blog set this whole book in motion! He is a good man, always struggling to make Ethiopia, the country of his birth, a better place for all.

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Marina Gorbis was one of the very first people I talked to about the ideas in this book and the first to host me for a roundtable on the themes at her little jewel box, the Institute for the Future, in Palo Alto. She was always generous with her insights and her time.

Johan Rockstrm was kind enough to walk me through all the planetary boundaries while on a visit to his wonderful research center in Stockholm; he also proofed some of this text. There is no better teacher on the environment. My thanks as well to Hans Vestberg for hosting me at Ericsson on that same trip to Sweden.

John Doerr and his colleague Bill Joy were, as always, open to sharing their insights and improving mine on cross-country ski runs and hikes. Yaron Ezrahi, also on his seventh book with me, never failed to teach me something new and force me to think deeper about what I had already written. Alan Cohen never tires of tutoring me on the cutting edges of technology, and Moshe Halbertal does the same when it comes to the Middle East.

In addition, I had many rich conversations over the past two years, from which I benefited enormously, with Larry Diamond, Eric Beinhocker, Leon Wieseltier, Lin Wells, Robert Walker, K. R. Sridhar, Sadik Yildiz, P. V. Kannan, Kayvon Beykpour, Joel Hyatt, Jeff Bezos, Wael Ghonim, Nandan Nilekani, Gautam Mukunda, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, Rabbi Jonathan Maltzman, Russ Mittermeier, Glenn Prickett, Dennis Ross, Tom Lovejoy, Richard K. Miller, Jeffrey Garten, Moises Naim, Carla Dirlikov Canales, David Rothkopf, Jonathan Taplin, David Kennedy, Zach Sims, Jeff Weiner, Laura Blumenfeld, Kofi Annan, Peter Schwartz, Mark Madden, Phil Bucksbaum, Bill Galstos, Craig Charney, Adam Sweidan, and James H. Baker, director of the Pentagons Office of Net Assessment. I thank each of them for the time they shared making me smarter about everything from politics to ethics to the climate to geopolitics.

A hearty thanks to Ian Goldin at the University of Oxford for hosting me for three really stimulating days at the Martin School, and to Gahl Burt for doing the same at the American Academy in Berlin. A shout-out of thanks as well to Nader Mousavizadeh and his colleagues at Macro Advisory Partners in London for always being up for doing jazz on any subject.

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I would not have understood the education-to-work channel without the generous and repeated tutoring of Byron Auguste, Karan Chopra, Stefanie Sanford, and David Colemanthe absolute A-team of thinkers on the nexus between education and work. And a special thanks to Alexis Ringwald for sharing her insights on that subject from LearnUp and to Eleonora Sharef for doing the same with all she learned cofounding HireArtand more.

From Minnesota, I am deeply indebted to Vice President Walter Mondale, the late Bill Frenzel, Senator Al Franken, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Sharon Isbin, Wendi Zelkin Rosenstein, and Norman Ornstein for taking time to share their insights. And a huge and special thanks goes to Larry Jacobs of the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota, for not only hosting me but educating me about Minnesota politics today and reading portions of the book. I am also deeply indebted to Tim Welsh and his colleague at McKinsey & Co. in Minneapolis, Julia Silvis, for all the introductions they made and all their help in reading portions, sharing ideas, introducing me to the right peoplelike MayKao Hang, Brad Hewitt, Michael Gorman, David Mortenson, and Mary Brainerdand enabling me to understand the Itasca Project. Sondra Samuels patiently tutored me on the good works of the Northside Achievement Zone and her important partnership with Itasca. Rob Metz, the superintendent of schools in St. Louis Park, and Scott Meyers, the high school principal, were enormously helpful in getting me together with both their students and their colleagues and sharing their own insights.