Thomas Friedman

MIDS [Microprocessor Immune Deficiency Syndrome]: A disease that can afflict any bloated, overweight, sclerotic system in the post-Cold War era. MIDS is usually contracted by countries and companies that fail to innoculate themselves against changes brought about by the microchip, and the democratizations of technology, finance and information - which created a much faster, more open and more complex marketplace, with a whole new set of efficiencies. The symptoms of MIDS appear when a country or company exhibits a consistent inability to increase productivity, wages, living standards, knowledge use and competitiveness, and becomes too slow to respond to the challenges of the Fast World. Countries and companies with MIDS tend to be those run on Cold War corporate models - where one or few people at the top hold all the information and make all the decisions, and all the people in the middle and the bottom simply carry out those decisions, using only the information they need to know to do their jobs. The only known cure for countries and companies with MIDS is 'the fourth democratization.' This is the democratization of decision-making and information flows, and the deconcentration of power, in ways that allow more people in a country or company to share knowledge, experiment and innovate faster. This enables them to keep up with a marketplace in which consumers are constantly demanding cheaper products and services tailored specifically for them. MIDS can be fatal to those companies and countries that do not get appropriate treatment in time.