Condi Rice I'm Coming For Your Job - Part Five

It's hard to remind ourselves during these times of economic meltdown that despite all the bad in our wallets and red in our investment accounts most of our lives are quite good. Yes, an occasional blunder on a poorly timed ag sector investment or perhaps a few extra bucks for a bag of groceries sure does complicate life...there's no doubt about that. But, at the same time there is a population on our globe that prays and wishes those were the kind of problems they had to deal with. Thus the segway to this edition of Condi Rice I'm Coming For Your Job.

Googol (note the spelling) is a mathematical term that is equivalent to a 10 followed by 100 zeros. It's slightly more than the US deficit (keeping in mind that McCain has another $300 billion waiting in the wings that should get us fairly close to that if it passes). Google (the company, not the number) decided to showcase this number by announcing a contest to save the world as a 'present' to themselves for turning the ripe age of ten. I think I got a Bart Simpson t-shirt when I hit that milestone. Must be nice to be Google huh?

Here's a link to the contest http://www.project10tothe100.com/...check out the site, watch the clever youtube video and let your creative juices start flowing. No problem too big, no problem too small...the point here is impact. Who can we help the most? Oh, and did I mention Google is throwing $10 million bucks into the ring for project funding and implementation? Well they are. Again, must be nice to be Google huh?

Since my current residence is abroad, I thought it would be wise to enlist the help of the international community (my corridor mates) by having them participate in some good old fashion brainstorming led by yours truly. I called an impromptu meeting of the corridor that conveniently revolved around the dinner hour. Genius!

As folks wandered into the common area looking to prepare a hot meal I quickly pounced on them for their knowledge and know how. I explained in detail the plan (that we were solving the worlds problems) and asked them if they wanted to help. Mixed reactions....Nico (Germany) asked me "If this was like the time I wanted to calculate the break even point for how many liters of alcohol we would have to bring back with us to sell in order to pay for a trip to Poland?".... similarly Amandine (France) asked me "If this involved Iphones?"....and Emma (Canadian) mentioned that "The last great plan I suggested involved 5 of us buying a 5 kilo cheese wheel and splitting it 5 ways thus freezing the part we didn't eat that week and saving 'big bucks' by buying in bulk". Fine, I thought, we don't need their help anyways. Fewer names to fit onto the Nobel.

With the advisory board assembled (5 of us in total) we began. I scribbled notes on the white board with my new dry erase markers (thanks Linds) as we talked. While we didn't really come up with a one gun solution we did manage to spend three hours chatting about the problems and opportunities we see in our countries and places we've been. No one pointed fingers, no one tried to 'sell' anything to anyone, and no one felt uncomfortable in sharing. While we probably won't win the Google prize for our efforts, our efforts may have yielded the magic bullet that can be the backdrop for the winning submission. At the end of the night we all decided that 'despite our problems and despite our differences we are far more similar to one another than we are different'. Despite the challenges we think we have in our lives, and the conflicts that our countries have with one another, we would do far more good in this world if we worked in cooperation with one another as opposed to wasting our energy against one another fighting over things we can't define.

Albert Einstein once said that "If I had only an hour to save the world I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it". Perhaps that's the google prize.