Sustainable Organization and Tom Friedman's The World is Flat

Tom was on Charlie Rose last night (April 27) and he gave a really good interview about his book. Aside from the calculated pitch he was making against Bush's Social Security initiative and his self-serving pumping up of some his more obvious insights, he did make a point I think may be really telling and could be a source for optimism about a sustainable community of nations. In effect, the forces of realpolitics might get counterbalanced by the interdependency created through supply chains that cross national boundaries and make businesses and economies operate more like a network than stand alone nation states. From a Sustainable Organization point of view, we may be seeing the emergence of a cascaded context that undercuts the "win" "lose" propositions of traditional nation states and their bureaucracies. I hope so.

Implications of supply chain interdependence also tie into other aspects of Sustainable Organization. I'm thinking particularly of how Adaptive Alignment and Requisite Competencies in a "just in time" environment start to make labour an infinitely shiftable commodity. The need for a consistent methodology for measurement of competencies thus gains significant momentum.