book review of the book

8/3/2019 Book Review of the Book

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Loren Friedman was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on July 20, 1953, and grew up in

the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He is the son of Harold and Margaret

Friedman.

From an early age, Friedman, whose father often brought him to the golf course for a round after

work, wanted to be a professional golfer. He was captain of the St. Louis Park High golf team; at

the 1970 U.S. Open at Hazeltine National Golf Club, he caddied for Chi Chi Rodriquez, whocame in 27th. That, alas, was as close as Friedman would get to professional golf. In high school,

however, he developed two other passions that would define his life from then on: the Middle

East and journalism. It was a visit to Israel with his parents during Christmas vacation in 1968

69 that stirred his interest in the Middle East, and it was his high school journalism teacher,

Hattie Steinberg, who inspired in him a love of reporting and newspapers.

After graduating from high school in 1971, Friedman attended the University of Minnesota and

Brandeis University, and graduated summa cum laude in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean

studies. During his undergraduate years, he spent semesters abroad at the Hebrew University of

Jerusalem and the American University in Cairo. Following his graduation from Brandeis,Friedman attended St. Antony's College, Oxford University, on a Marshall Scholarship. In 1978,

he received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. That summer he

joined the London Bureau of United Press International (UPI) on Fleet Street, where he worked

as a general assignment reporter.


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Friedman spent almost a year reporting and editing in London before UPI dispatched him to

Beirut as a correspondent in the spring of 1979. He and his wife Ann lived in Beirut from June

1979 to May 1981 while he covered the civil war there.In May 1981, Friedman was offered a job by the

legendary New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal.He left Beirut and joined the staff of The New York

Times in Manhattan. He was hired by The New

York Times as a reporter, and was redispatched to

Beirut at the start of the 1982 Israeli invasion of

Lebanon. Friedman's coverage of the war,

particularly the Sabra and Shatila massacre,[12] won

him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Friedman, along side David K. Shipler, also won the

George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting.

Friedman played a lot of sports, becoming serious

about tennis and golf. He caddied at a local country

club; in 1970 he caddied for the legendary Chi Chi Rodriguez when the US Open came to town.

In June 1984, Friedman was transferred to Jerusalem, where he served as the Times Jerusalem

Bureau Chief until February 1988. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the

First Palestinian Intifada. Afterwards he wrote a book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describing his

experiences in the Middle East.[13]

Friedman covered Secretary of State James Baker during the administration of United States

President George H. W. Bush. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, he became theWhite House correspondent for the Times. In 1994, he began to write more about foreign policy

and economics, and moved to the op-ed page of The New York Times the following year as a

foreign affairs columnist. In 2002, Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "for his

clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the

terrorist threat."

In February 2002, Friedman met Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and personally encouraged him

to make his comprehensive attempt to end the Arab-Israeli

conflict by normalizing Arab relations with Israel in

exchange for the return of refugees alongside an end to theIsrael territorial occupations. Abdullah proposed the Arab

Peace Initiative at the Beirut Summit that March, which

Friedman has strongly supported since.[14]


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Friedman is the recipient of the 2004 Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement, and

has been named to the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize threetimes:1983: for his coverage of the war in

Lebanon. A distinguished example of

international reporting.

1988: for coverage of Israel: a distinguished

example of reporting on international affairs

2002: for his commentary illuminating the

worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.

In addition, in 2005 he was elected as amember of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

After spending a great deal of time in the Middle East in the years after 9/11, Friedman decided

to do some reporting elsewhere, particularly India. In April 2005, FSG published his fourth

book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first

Century.(the first 3 being From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989; revised edition

1990),The Lexus and the Olive Tree: UnderstandingGlobalization (1999; revised edition 2000) and Longitudes and

Attitudes: Exploring the World After September

11

The book became a #1 New York

Times bestseller and received the inaugural

Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November

2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006. The

World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages.


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THE WORLD IS FLAT

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-

First Century is an international bestselling book byThomas Friedman that analyzes globalization,

primarily in the early 21st century. The title is a

metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing

field in terms of commerce, where all competitors

have an equal opportunity. As the first edition cover

illustration indicates, the title also alludes to the

perceptual shift required for countries, companies

and individuals to remain competitive in a global

market where historical and geographical divisions

are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The book was first released in 2005, was later

released as an "updated and expanded" edition in

2006, and yet again released with additional updates

in 2007 as "further updated and expanded: Release

3.0." The title was derived from a statement by Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys.

The World is Flat won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the

Year Award in 2005.

In The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist,explores the political and technological changes that have flattened the world and made it a

smaller place. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the explosion of the internet to the dot com

bubble and bust and outsourcing of jobs to India and China, globalization has evened the playing

field for many emerging economies. He also explains how these changes could potentially affect

social and religious organizations. He argues that it's not a message of doom and gloom, but

financial and political realities which require change to

stay on top of them.The book the world is flat has been divided into fifteen

chapters,where as we are introduced to Friedmans theorythat the world is flat, we accompany him on a journey tothe various locations around the globe that led him to thisconclusion. The book begins with the chapter While Iwas sleeping. We start off in Bangalore, India, where hefinds himself surrounded by advertisements oftraditionally American companies such as Pizza Hut,Epson, HP and Texas Instruments during a round of golf.


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Traveling with a crew from the Discovery Times channel, he encounters Indian workers andbusinesspeople working for American companies, speaking in American accents and evenadopting American names in their own country. A visit toInfosys Technologies Ltd leaves Friedman in wonder atthe massive conferencing system they have created that

allows people from around the globe to congregate andcollaborate in one giant room via satellite andteleconferencing technology.

Friedman guides us through the different eras ofglobalization as he has defined them in an historicalnarrative from the days of Columbus to our present daystate. We see the ever increasing pace of globalizationthrough his encounters with people such as JaithirthJerry Rao, an outsourced businessman in India, andothers. Through Jerry, we learn about the process of information exchange online and the effect

it has on businesses to perform various duties from remote locations with everything from taxpreparation to hair appointment scheduling to hospital bookings cited as examples ofoutsourcing.

As Friedman travels through Japan, China and back to America, we study various examples ofthe business outsourcing phenomenon and its impact, positive and negative, on the playersinvolved. Homesourcing and military outsourcing are explored as Friedman explains the sheer

prevalence of outsourcing in our society.

The second chapter throws more light on what ThomasFriedman means by the phrase The World is Flat, which

is that the global competitive playing field is beingleveledIt is now possible for more people than ever tocollaborate and compete in real time with more otherpeople on more different kinds of work from more differentcorners of the planet and on a more equal footing than atany previous time in the history of the world. Friedmanbelieves that this flattening of the world is the result often factors.

We are introduced to Friedmans interpretation of the teninfluencing factors that led to globalization and world flattening, the first being the falling of theBerlin Wall in 1989, which tipped the balance of power across the world towards democratic freemarket and away from authoritarian rule. A second flattener is identified as our ability to notonly author our own content, but to send it worldwide with the 1995 launch of the Internet.Subsequently, free workflow software was developed, allowing people from around the world tocollaborate and work together on projects using a shared medium. As Apache and Wikipediacame into play, we became able to develop and upload web content and communitycollaboration became another flattening force. Preparations for Y2K required resources beyondthose available in the United States and as a result, we see that India became responsible for ahuge portion of these preparations. Offshoring, using the Chinese manufacturing sector as a


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prime example, has forced other developing countries to try to keep up with their low costsolutions, resulting in better quality and cheaper products being produced worldwide.

The seventh flattening factor is our introduction to supply chaining, which is discussed in muchgreater detail later in Chapter Fourteen. Rounding out his list with insourcing, in-forming and

the steroids, Friedman examines his flattening factors, their origins and the effect they willhave on the way we do business in the future.

Friedman defines ten "flatteners" that he sees as leveling the global playing field:y #1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall 11/9/89: Friedman called the flattener, "When the walls

came down, and the windowscame up." The event not onlysymbolized the end of the ColdWar, it allowed people from theother side of the wall to join the

economic mainstream. "11/9/89"is a discussion about the BerlinWall coming down, the "fall" ofcommunism, and the impact thatWindows powered PCs (personalcomputers) had on the ability ofindividuals to create their owncontent and connect to oneanother. At that point, the basicplatform for the revolution tofollow was created: IBM PC,

Windows, a standardized graphical interface for word processing, dial-up modems, astandardized tool for communication, and a global phone network.y #2: Netscape 8/9/95: Netscape went public at the price of $28. Netscape and the Web

broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium usedprimarily by "early adopters and geeks" to something that made the Internet accessible toeveryone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year-olds. The digitization that took place meantthat everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music, and pictures could be accessedand manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.

y #3: Workflow software: Friedman's catch-all for the standards and technologies that allowedwork to flow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, asstated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a "crudefoundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration." There was an emergence ofsoftware protocols (SMTP simple mail transfer protocol; HTML the language thatenabled anyone to design and publish documents that could be transmitted to and read onany computer anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what Friedman called the "Genesismoment of the flat world." The net result "is that people can work with other people on morestuff than ever before." This created a global platform for multiple forms of collaboration.The next six flatteners sprung from this platform.


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y #4: Uploading: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examplesinclude open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon

"the most disruptive force of all."

#5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues thatoutsourcing has allowed companies to splitservice and manufacturing activities intocomponents which can be subcontracted andperformed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. This process became easierwith the mass distribution of fiber opticcables during the introduction of the WorldWide Web.

y#6: Offshoring: The internalrelocation of a company's manufacturing or

other processes to a foreign land to takeadvantage of less costly operations there. China's entrance in the WTO (World TradeOrganization) allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such asMalaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businessesoffshore to them.

y #7: Supply-chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, andpoints to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline itemsales, distribution, and shipping.

y#8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which thecompany's employees perform services beyond shipping for another company. Forexample, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPShub, by UPS employees.

y #9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in thehistory of the planet have so many people on their own had the ability to find so muchinformation about so many things and about so many other people," writes Friedman. Thegrowth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman statesthat it is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million justthree years ago."

y #10: "The Steroids": Wireless, Voice over Internet, and file sharing. Personal digital deviceslike mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice overInternet Protocol (VoIP). Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual all analog content andprocesses (from entertainment to photography to word processing) can be digitized andtherefore shaped, manipulated and transmitted; virtual these processes can be done at highspeed with total ease; mobile can be done anywhere, anytime by anyone; and personal can be done by you.


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In addition to the ten flatteners, Friedman offers "the triple convergence", three additionalcomponents that acted on theflatteners to create a new,flatter global playing field.

Up until the year 2000, theten flatteners were semi-independent from oneanother. An example ofindependence is the inabilityof one machine to performmultiple functions. Whenwork-flow software andhardware converged,multiple functions such as e-mail, fax, printing, copying

and communicating wereable to be done from onemachine. Around the year 2000, all the flatteners converged with one another. This convergencecould be compared to complementary goods, in that each flattener enhanced the other flatteners;the more one flattener developed, the more leveled the global playing field became.

After the emergence of the ten flatteners, a new business model was required to succeed. Whilethe flatteners alone were significant, they would not enhance productivity without people beingable to use them together. Instead of collaborating vertically (the top-down method ofcollaboration, where innovation comes from the top), businesses needed to begin collaboratinghorizontally. Horizontalization means companies and people collaborate with other departments

or companies to add value, creation or innovation. Friedman's Convergence II occurs whenhorizontalization and the ten flatteners begin to reinforce each other and people understand thecapability of the technologies available.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries that had followed the Soviet economic model including India, China, Russia, and the nations of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and CentralAsia began to open up their economies to the world. When these new players converged withthe rest of the globalized marketplace, they added new brain power to the whole playing fieldand enhanced horizontal collaboration across the globe. In turn, Convergence III is the mostimportant force shaping politics and economics in the early 21st century.

Acknowledging that the ten factors he discussed ,could not have flattened the world all on theirown, Friedman explains that as each of the factors came together, they had to spread and takeroot to create the environment rich for flattening. He credits this spread, the creation ofcomplementary software and the internet, and political factors that caused several developingcountries, including China, Russia, India and Latin America, to open their borders at this timewith the creation of the perfect storm that led to the rapid-fire pace of globalization.


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Through interviews with U.S. Embassy officials in Beijing, we explore the desperation ofChinese students to study and work in America. For the first time in history, we see that talenthas become more important than geography in determining a persons opportunity in life. Wefollow the path of a Boeing jet as components of its manufacture are outsourced to Russia andthen India, allowing for faster and cheaper development of more planes as Friedman

demonstrates the need for individuals and businesses to be able to compete in a globalmarketplace.

Friedman works to dispel common myths about globalization as we explore the dot.com boomand bust, the American governments misinformation of the public as the triple convergence tookplace and the IT revolution we have heard so much about in the last 20 years.

CONCLUSION

Thomas Friedman believes that to fight the quiet crisis of a flattening world, the United Stateswork force should keep updating its work skills. Making the work force more adaptable,Friedman argues, will keep it more employable. He also suggests that the government make iteasier to switch jobs by making retirement benefits and health insurance less dependent on one'semployer and by providing insurance that would partly cover a possible drop in income whenchanging jobs. Friedman also believes there should be more inspiration for youth to be scientists,engineers, and mathematicians due to a decrease in the percentage of these professionals beingAmerican.

Thomas Friedmans examination of the influences shapingbusiness and competition in a technology-fueled global

environment is a call to action for governments,businesses and individuals who must stay ahead of thesetrends in order to remain competitive.In a narrative punctuated by case studies, interviews andsometimes surprising statistics, Friedmans message isclear: be prepared, because this phenomenon waits for noone. Without rhetoric or scare tactics, he paints a pictureof a world moving faster than most can keep up. As weexplore Americas place in the fast-evolving world economic platform, Friedman presents notonly the problems we face, but preventative measures and possible solutions.

The World is Flat is an historical and geographical journey, with stories and anecdotes from thedays of Columbus to a modern day Indian call center; from the Great Depression to the homeoffice of a Midwestern-USA housewife demonstrating the pervasiveness of the world-flatteningtrend. Spanning a broad range of industries, cultures and schools of thought, the real-worldexamples presented as evidence of his theory are undeniable.


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From teleconferencing topodcasts and manufacturing torestaurant order taking, TheWorld is Flat leaves no stoneunturned in a quest for answers

to a problem that most cannoteven define. Friedmansdissection of globalization is avaliant attempt at explaining andunderstanding the forces drivingthe flattening of the world,though he admits that the verynature of beast prevents onefrom having all of the answers.This candor is in keeping withthe theme of the entire book, in

that we must learn how to learn, teaching ourselves to stay curious and innovative, if we are toexcel in a global economy.

As he moves towards the end of this presentation of his theory, Friedman warns of the forces thatcould seriously harm or slow the flattening of the world, particularly the threat posed by terroristnetworks such as Al-Qaeda. His perspective is refreshing in a media driven largely by scaretactics and fear mongering as he encourages a realistic and objective approach to this threat.

As people become more able to collaborate, compete and share with others of different cultures,religions, educational backgrounds and languages, The World is Flat is a necessary reality checkto bring these factors into perspective and offer, if not answers to every problem, the drive to

uncover working solutions.

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