Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

described how, based on the bank’s research into trends and forecasts, the future lay not with the original G6 countries but with the burgeoning economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China – the BRICs economies. The Goldman Sachs predictions – and remember, economics isn’t fortune telling – can be summed up as follows:
    • China to be larger than everyone but the US by 2016
    • India to be larger than Japan by 2032
    • BRICs economies to be larger than the G6 by 2039
    • China to be larger than the US by 2041.
    In other words, the post-Imperial, post-World Wars model of who’s in charge of the world is changing. It’s changing fast and it’s changing now, before our very eyes. If they were open.
    Take India. When I was entering the job market towards the end of the 1980s, there was a great deal of pressure on us all to be Japanese. No business meeting was complete without some reference to ‘kaizen’ (interestingly, the supposed antidote to the Industrial Method – see chapter 17 ), ‘kanban’ or even ‘gembutsu’ on a good day. And where was India? Nowhere. But Japan was about to enter its ‘lost decade’ as economists call it and we see India, in the following decade and a half, taking over what was left of British Steel, buying out Jaguar-Land Rover, sending rocketsaround the moon and Calcutta-born businessman Lakshmi Mittal topping the
Sunday Times Rich List
2 in 2009 (with a Russian at number two, interestingly) even though his net worth was down by more than 60 per cent, a ‘loss’ of an estimated £16.9 billion. 3 In the words of Peter Day on BBC Radio 4’s
In Business
, ‘India – a place where people come to see the future’. 4
    That’s a far cry from being the call centre capital of the world. And anyway, in case you haven’t noticed, that Indian call centre thing? That’s so last year. As India moves quickly up the pecking order it is passing the call centre mantle to countries in Africa, as major international conferences like
Contact Centres World Africa
5 in Johannesburg testify. And don’t just put China down as a nation of manufacturers who can ‘copy everything but your mother’ as their saying goes. According to consultants Deloitte, China is ‘emerging as the global centre of management innovation’. 6
    Or what about that point in India where business, technology and education converge? Take the story of Infosys, India’s second(!) biggest software company, as reported in
Fortune
magazine. In 2005, it expanded its workforce by 15,000 or a rate of 40 people a day. Of the jobs that were on offer, 1.3 million people applied but only 1 per cent was hired. (By comparison, the magazine describes how Harvard in the US accepts 9 per cent of all its applicants.) In 2009,
Fortune
magazine listed Infosys among its top 100 fastest-growing companies. 7
    Talking of higher education, bear in mind, too, that in 2008 China turned out 6.1 million graduates, almost a six-fold increase on its 2000 figure. 8 By 2011, that figure is estimated to be 7.6 million. And in case you feel that maybe we’re safe over here from such competition because of the language thing, bear in mind that, in the cities at least, Chinese children start learning English at reception age and can only be entered for a doctorate,
regardless of the subject
, if they are fluent. Not to mention the fact that the government has recruited more than 10,000 volunteers to spread the Chinese language across the world too. In the words of one Chinese official quoted in
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
, ‘We’ve had a couple of hundred bad years but now we’re back’ (Prestowitz 2006).
    I’m not sharing with you such facts to shake you up but to wake you up. You have to produce world-class people and you have to start now.
    Another publication that had a similar effect to the BRICs report was a book by three-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas Friedman. There are countless management/business/popular economics-type books published every year, as a visit to any airport bookshop will prove, but somewhere between the cheese-moving, fish-throwing black swans, you will find a book that really did set the world talking.
The World is Flat
did just that.
    Friedman realized that, whilst he had been reporting on strife in the Middle East as a journalist for several years, something fundamental had changed in the world. Somehow, because of a series of unconnected