New York Times columnist Tom Friedman delivered today’s keynote speech at the SHRM annual conference in Orlando. The author of The World is Flat described how much the world has changed in just the last decade, with the invention and adoption of things like Facebook, Skype, and LinkedIn among other things.

Human Resource Executive Online reported 5 “edicts” Friedman gives to his own kids for surviving in the new age. Quoting HRE:

1) Always think like an immigrant, figuring out opportunities in a kind of paranoid optimism, staying hungry.

2) Think like an artisan, those specialists who made, and still make, every item individually and take so much pride in every single thing they do, they carve their initials in each and every one.

3) Always be in beta, where everything is only 85 percent done, where you throw it out to the public and get feedback, and, as he said, “you re-engineer everything.”

4) PQ & CQ is always > IQ. Translation: Passion quotient plus curiosity quotient is always greater than intelligence quotient. Unlike even a short decade ago, business leaders, at least those on an upward trajectory, “will take these [first two kinds of] kids over IQ kids any day and everyday,” Friedman said.

And 5) “Always think like a waitress at the Perkins Pancake House in Minneapolis,” who got a 50 percent tip from Friedman years ago for dishing out extra fruit to his breakfast guest because “in her own little world, that’s what she could do in her own little entrepreneurial way; she controlled the ladle, and she figured it out herself.”

Read their full article at: http://blog.hreonline.com/2014/06/23/friedman-shakes-shrm/