Thank You for Being Late

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What to expect

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L. Friedman, read by Oliver Wyman.

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and No.1 international bestselling author of The World is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the twenty-first century.

We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

In Thank You for Being Late, a work unlike any he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them.

Friedman's thesis is that to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet's three largest forces - Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss) - are all accelerating at once, transforming the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics and community. An extraordinary release of energy is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world - or perhaps to destroy it.

Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to think about this era of accelerations. It's also an argument for 'being late' - for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we're passing through and reflecting on its possibilities and dangers. He shows us how we can anchor ourselves as individuals in the eye of this storm, and how communities can create a 'topsoil of trust' to do the same for their increasingly diverse and digital populations.

Written with his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, and with unequalled access to many of those at the forefront of the changes he is describing all over the world, Thank You for Being Late is Friedman's most ambitious book - and an essential guide to the present and the future.

Critics Review

  • We need Tom Friedman … a major interpreter of the confusing world we inhabit – Joseph S. Nye

    Washington Post
  • A global star … given his track record as a zeitgeist thermometer, we should all pay attention

    Financial Times
  • Friedman is a green who’s good fun, a scientist who tells stories, a poet whose lyrics are pure logic, a missionary whose zeal doesn’t depress you. Phenomenal

    Spectator
  • The guy is a one-man think-tank: his writing is punchy, opinionated and pungent

    The Times

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