Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Replace Sombreros with Dollar Street
Children start learning about other countries and religions in preschool. Cute little world maps
with people in folklore dress from across the world are intended to make them aware of and
respectful toward other cultures. The intention is good but these kinds of illustrations can create an
illusion of great difference. People in other countries can seem stuck in historic and exotic ways of
life. Of course some Mexicans sometimes wear large sombreros, but these large hats nowadays are
probably more common on the heads of tourists.
Let’s show children Dollar Street instead, and show them how regular people live. If you are a
teacher, send your class “traveling” on dollarstreet.org and ask them to find differences within
countries and similarities across countries.
Business
A single typo in your CV and you probably don’t get the job. But if you put 1
billion people on the wrong continent you can still get hired. You can even get
a promotion.
Most Western employees in large multinationals and financial institutions
are still trying to operate according to a deeply rooted, outdated, and distorted
worldview. Yet global understanding is becoming more and more crucial, and
more and more possible. Most of us now work with consumers, producers,
service providers, colleagues, or clients all across the planet. Some decades
ago, when it was perhaps less important for us to know about the world, there
were almost no reliable and accessible global statistics. As the world changed,
though, the need for knowledge about the world also changed. Today, reliable
data is easily available for almost every subject. This is quite new: my first
partner in the fight against mega misconceptions was a photocopier, but today
all that data is freely available online. In recruitment, production, marketing,
and investment, it has never been easier or more important for business
leaders and employees to act on a fact-based worldview.
Using data to understand the globalized markets has already become part of
the culture. But when people’s worldviews are upside down, data snippets can
be just as misleading as wrong data or no data. Until one day someone
actually tests their global knowledge, everyone assumes they are getting it
kind of right.

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In sales and marketing, if you run a big business in Europe or the United
States, you and your employees need to understand that the world market of
the future will be growing primarily in Asia and Africa, not at home.
In recruitment, you need to understand that being a European or American
company no longer gives you bragging rights to attract international
employees. Google and Microsoft, for example, have become global
businesses and made their “Americanness” almost invisible. Their employees
in Asia and Africa want to be part of truly global companies and they are.
Their CEOs, Sundar Pichai of Google and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, were
both raised and educated in India.
When I present to European corporations, I always tell them to tune down
their European branding (“remove the Alps from your logo”) and to move
their headquarters—but not their European staff—elsewhere.
In production, you need to understand that globalization is not over.
Decades ago, Western companies realized that industrial production had to be
outsourced to the so-called emerging markets on Level 2, where products
could be manufactured at the same quality for less than half the price.
However, globalization is a continuing process, not a one-off event. The
textiles industry that moved from Europe to Bangladesh and Cambodia as
they reached Level 2 some decades ago will most likely soon move again as
Bangladesh and Cambodia become wealthier and approach Level 3. These
countries will have to diversify or suffer the consequences as their textiles
jobs are shifted to African countries.
In making investment decisions, you need to shake off any naïve views of
Africa shaped by the colonial past (and maintained by today’s media) and
understand that Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya are where some of the best
investment opportunities can be found today.
I think it will not be long before businesses care more about fact mistakes
than they do about speling miskates, and will want to ensure their employees
and clients are updating their worldview on a regular basis.