Innovation: Essentials from Leader to Leader

HESSELBEIN & COMPANY

 

FLAT, SPIKY, AND CURVED IS NOW OPEN

by Curtis J. Bonk

These are times of transition in perhaps every aspect of our lives. As happens in such moments, people step forward and offer to help make sense of what is occurring. Back in the spring of 2005, award-winning author Thomas Friedman attempted to lead us through these times by contending that we had entered a flatter economic world. His book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, drew wide acclaim and many ardent followers.

By the following October, however, Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, countered in the Atlantic Monthly that the world we are in is actually fairly spiky, not flat. He pointed out that innovation and ...