homas Friedman is narrowing his focus. In his 2005 bestseller, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,
the three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for The New York Times explored globalization with an eye on the leveling effects of the digital revolution. Three years later, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, he added global warming and population growth to the mix, and urged America to take the lead in addressing these potentially world-destabilizing problems. In his most recent book, That Used to Be Us:
How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and co- author Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign-policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, zero in on the United States, which they think has lost its way
— politically, economically, and even spiritually. They intend That Used to Be Us as “a road map for rising to the challenges and opportunities that will determine whether we remain a country that can continue to pass prosperity from one generation to the next, as we always have, and can continue to play the role of global stabilizer, as we must.” When Friedman delivers a General Session
presentation at Convening Leaders 2013 on Wednesday morning, Jan. 16, he will not be enter- ing a new environment. As this excerpt from That Used to Be Us suggests, he attends a lot of meetings and conferences — and has experienced them as both an incubator of new ideas and an indicator of international competitiveness.
. —Christopher Durso
› Thomas Friedman will present a General Session at Convening Leaders 2013 next month. For more information, visit conveningleaders.org.
PCMA Convening Leaders 2013
› Look for an in-depth Convening Leaders Follow-Up interview with Friedman in a future issue of Convene.
In September 2010, Tom [Friedman] attended the World Economic Forum’s summer conference in Tianjin, China. Five years earlier, getting to Tianjin had involved a three-and-a- half-hour car ride from Beijing to a polluted, crowded Chinese version of Detroit, but things had changed. Now, to get to Tianjin, you head to the Beijing South Railway Station — an ultramodern flying saucer of a building with glass walls and an oval roof covered with 3,246 solar panels — buy a ticket from an electronic kiosk offering choices in Chinese and English, and board a world- class high-speed train that goes right to another roomy, modern train station in downtown Tianjin. Said to be the fastest in the world when it began operating in 2008,
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In the New York Times columnist’s most recent book, That Used to Be Us, meetings and conferences are a constant presence — and a beautiful new convention center in China offers a wake-up call to a complacent United States.
Book Excerpt ‘32 Weeks to Build a World-Class Convention Center’
the Chinese bullet train covers 115 kilometers, or 72 miles, in a mere 29 minutes. The conference itself took
place at the Tianjin Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center — a massive, beautifully appointed structure, the likes of which exists in few American cities. As if the convention center wasn’t impressive enough, the conference’s co-sponsors in Tianjin gave some facts and figures about it (tj-summerdavos.cn). They noted that it contained a total floor area of 230,000 square meters (almost 2.5 million square feet) and that “construction of the Meijiang Convention Center started on September 15, 2009, and was completed in May, 2010.” Reading that line, Tom started counting on his fingers: Let’s see — September, October, November, December, January … Eight months. Returning home to Maryland
from that trip, Tom was describing the Tianjin complex and how quickly it was built to Michael [Mandelbaum] and his wife, Anne. At one point Anne asked: “Excuse me, Tom. Have you been to our subway stop lately?” We all live in Bethesda and often use the Washington Metrorail subway to get to work in downtown Washington, D.C. Tom had just been at the Bethesda station and knew exactly what Anne was talking about: The two short escalators had been under repair for nearly six months. While the one being