Running With Gazelles, Eating With Lions

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, by Thomas Friedman. Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a bestselling, well-written look at globalization. In a section about offshoring he reports a posting of an African proverb, translated into Mandarin, on the wall of a pump factory in Beijing:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.