the world is flat synopsis

8/8/2019 The World is Flat Synopsis

1/6

The World is Flat:

A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005

Thomas L. Friedman

No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: Aim at either Microsoft or IBM. I was

standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing

partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The

Goldman Sachs building wasnt done yet, otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a

threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasnt all.

The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M.

Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the

way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline Gigabites of Taste!

No, this definitely wasnt Kansas. It didnt even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the

Next World? (pp. 3-4).

When all of these things (explosion of technology; e-mail, search engines, proprietary software; ) suddenly

came together around 2000, they created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be

delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together

again and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we work, especially work of an intellectual

nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore is really the culmination of all these things coming together.

(Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys Technologies Limited). (pp. 6&7).

The global competitive playing field was being leveled. The world was being flattened. (p. 8).

Bangalore is one of the most wired places in the world. The difference, however, is that wages and rents in

Bangalore are less than one-fifth what they are in Western capitals. (p. 18).

UPI might still be thriving today as a wire service, which it is not, if it had been able to outsource some of its

lower end business when I started as a reporter in London twenty-five years ago.I firmly believe in the lesson of classical economists about moving work to where it can be done best,

However, we must not ignore that in some cases, individual workers will not easily find new work. For them,

retraining and an adequate safety net are needed. (Tom Glocer, CEO, Reuters a pioneer in the outsourcing of

elements of the news supply chain). (pp. 16 & 19 & 20).

There was no single cause (for the fall of the Berlin wall). To some degree the termites just ate away at the

foundations of the Soviet Union, which were already weakened by the systems own internal contradictions and

inefficiencies; to some degree the Reagan administrations military buildup But if I had to point to one factor

as the first among equals, it was the information revolution that began in the early-to-mid 1980s. Totalitarian

systems depend on a monopoly of information and force, and too much information started to slip through the

Iron Curtain, thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones, and other tools of modern communication. Acritical mass of IBM PCs, and the Windows operating system that brought them to life, came together in

roughly this time period that the wall fell, and their diffusion put the nail in the coffin of communism, because

they vastly improved horizontal communication to the detriment of the exclusively top-down form that

communism was based upon. They also greatly enhanced personal information gathering and personal

empowerment. (p. 52)

Thanks to the platform that emerged from the first three flatteners, we were not just able to talk with each other

more, we were able to do more things together. The next six flatteners represent the new forms of collaboration

which this new platform empowered And as more and more of us learn how to collaborate in these different

ways, we are flattening the world even more. (p. 81).


2/6

There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world. A lot of vanilla making in software and other

areas is going to shift to open-source communities. For most companies, the commercial future belongs to

those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce (p. 91).

The striking thing about the intellectual commons form of open-sourcing is how quickly it has morphed into

other spheres and spawned other self-organizing collaborative communities, which are flattening hierarchies in

their areas. I see this most clearly in the news professions, where bloggers, one-person online commentators,

who often link to one another depending on their ideology, have created a kind of open-source newsroom. (p.93).

If everyone contributes his or her intellectual capital for free, where will the resources for new innovation come

from? And wont we end up in endless legal wrangles over which part of an innovation was made by the

community for free, and meant to stay that way, and which part was added by some company for profit and has

to be paid for so that the company can make money to drive further innovation? (p. 96).

India could never have afforded to pay for the bandwidth to connect brainy India with high-tech America, so

American shareholders paid for it. Sure, overinvestment can be good. The overinvestment in railroads turned

out to be a great boon for the American economy. But the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own

country and so too were the benefits, said Dinaker Singh (hedge fund manager on Wall Street), In the case ofthe digital railroads, it was the foreigners who benefited. India got to ride for free. (p. 105).

If Americans and Europeans want to benefit from the flattening of the world and the interconnecting of all the

markets and knowledge centers, they will all have to run at least as fast as the fastest lion and I suspect that

lion will be China, and I suspect that will be pretty darn fast. (p. 127).

Wal-mart is the China of companies. It has so much leverage that it can grind down any supplier to the last

halfpenny. And it is not at all hesitant about using its ability to play its foreign and domestic suppliers off

against each other.

Some of Wal-Marts suppliers have no doubt translated Wal-Marts incessant price pressure into lower wages

and benefits for their employees or watched as their business moved to China, whence Wal-Marts supply chainpulled in $18 billion worth of goods in 2004 from five thousand Chinese suppliers. (p. 137).

And now the icing on the cake, the bersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what will allow

you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

In the early days of computing (Globalization 2.0), you worked in the office Now we are in Globalization 3.0,

where, thanks to digitization, miniaturization, virtualization, personalization, and wireless, I can be processing,

collecting, or transmitting voice or data from anywhere to anywhere as an individual or as a machine. (pp.

168 & 169).

Save for a tiny minority, these 3 billion people had never been allowed to compete and collaborate before,

because they lived in largely closed economies with very vertical, hierarchical political and economic structures.I am talking about the people of Chna, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia When

did these 3 billion people converge with the new playing field and the new processes? Right when the field was

being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally,

and with cheaper and more readily available tools than ever before. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the

world, many of these new entrants didnt even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the to ten flatteners,

the playing field came to them.

It is this triple convergence of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for

horizontal collaboration that I believe is the most important force shaping global politics in the early

twenty-first century The next generation of innovations will come from all over Planet Flat. (pp. 181-182).


3/6

You know the IT revolution that the business press has been touting for the last twenty years? Sorry, but that

was only the prologue. The last twenty years were just about forging, sharpening, and distributing all the new

tools with which to collaborate and connect. Now the real IT revolution is about to begin by the main

event, I mean an era in which technology will literally transform every aspect of business, every aspect of life

and every aspect of society. (Carla Fiorina, then CEO of HP). (p. 200).

You have the quintessential British company, Rolls-Royce, which, though still headquartered in England, now

operates through a horizontal supply chain, and its CEO, a British citizen knighted by the queen, is being

courted by the chancellor of Germany to help him drum up business in Russia, because one link in the Rolls-Royce supply chain happens to run through Brandenburg. Sort that out. (p. 212).

When you move from a vertical (command and control) world to a much more horizontal (connect and

collaborate) flat world, your boss can do his job and your job. He can be secretary of state and his own

secretary, he can give you instructions day or night. You are never out. You are are always in. Therefore, you

are always on There are a lot more conversations between bosses and staffers today that start like this: I

know that already! I googled it myself. Now what do I do about it? Sort that out. (p. 213).

There are two ways to flatten the world. One is to use our imagination to bring everyone up to the same level,

and the other is to use your imagination to bring everyone down to the same level. (p. 447).

The World is Flat:

A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005

Thomas L. Friedman

The playing field has been leveled. The world is flat. Everyone is

your competition. Everyone, everywhere in the world. The only

possible path to follow is the path of creative imagination. Or else

Tom, the playing field is being leveled. (Nandan Nilekani to Thomas Friedman in Bangalore).

Three great eras of globalization:

1. From 1492 to about 1800 Globalization 1.0. It shrank the world from a size large to a size

medium. (brawn; horsepower; wind and then steam power) Countries globalizing

2. From 1800 to about 2000 Globalization 2.0. It shrank the world from a size medium to asize small. (multinationals) Companies globalizing

3. From 2000 Globalization 3.0. It shrank the world from a size small to a size tiny.

Individuals globalizing


4/6

The Ten Forces that Flattened the World

1. 11/9/89 When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up

2. 8/9/95 When Netscape went Public

3. Work Flow Software Lets do Lunch: Have your application talk to my application

4. Open-Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities (e.g.: Wikipedia)

5. Outsourcing Y2K

6. Offshoring Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions

7. Supply Chaining Eating Sushi in Arkansas (Have you heard of Wal-mart?)

8. Insourcing What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts are Really Doing

9. In-Forming Google, Yahoo, MSN Web Search

10. The Steroids Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual

The triple convergence

new players

on a new playing field

developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration

The new zippies

a young city or suburban resident, with a zip in his stride. Generation Z. Oozes attitude,

ambition, and aspiration. Cool, confident, and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks, and shuns

fear.

From Command and Control to Collaborate and Connect

The death of the salesman (no longer: be liked and you will never want.)

business without the fat but the fat is what gives meat its taste.

an ever shrinking gap between America and the rest of the world

Americas quiet crisis

1. Dirty little secret number one: the numbers gap


5/6

2. Dirty little secret number two: the ambition gap

3. Dirty little secret number three: the education gap

Five broad categories for the age of flat

1. Leadership

2. Muscle building

3. Cushioning

4. Social activism

5. Parenting

Culture matters: Glocalization

Rules for companies:

1. Rule #1: When the world goes flat and you are feeling flattened reach

out for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Dont try to build walls. (learn

the fact that the competition pool is now between big companies, medium

companies, and free-lancers - -all competing for the same business).

2. Rule #2: And the small shall act big

3. Rule #3: And the big shall act small

4. Rule #4: The best companies are the best collaborators The next layers

of value creation are becoming so complex that no single firm or

department is going to be able to master them alone.

5. Rule #5: In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular

chest X-rays, and then selling the results to their clients.

6. Rule #6: The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink.

7. Rule #7: Outsourcing isnt just for Benedict Arnolds. Its also for

idealists.

Who is missing out? the unflat world

1. The too sick (countries/parts of countries too hopeless to plug in)

2. The too disempowered

3. The too frustrated

4. Too many Toyotas (the natural resource restraint)

The Dell theory of Conflict Prevention

( A few words about Al Queda, or: the scary side of the flat world)


6/6

The most important attribute in a flat world: creative imagination

nurturing 11/9 hope in a 9/11 world.

Randy Mayeux

[email protected]

the world is flat synopsis

Documents