He starts how he accidentally decided to write the book. While he was doing some documentaries for Discovery channel, he got to travel to India to do some interviews for “getting the other side of outsourcing”. During one of his interview he discussed with a CEO of a technology company in India who stated that “The global economic field is being levelled”. After the interview and while he spent his time at the hotel room he was thinking about that statement and he discovered that while he was asleep the world was flattened. He decided to dig into this topic, he took several months leave from his job at The New York Times.
During his talk he started to describe the first three chapters of his book. In the first chapter he talked about how he started to work on this book, how he did the interviews in India, how he discovered that in North-Est China there are thousands of Japanese speaking Chinese are running the backrooms, running the software and doing the business processing for major Japanese multinationals and major American multinationals formally based in Tokyo. He also gives an example of Blue Airlines employee Betty who is getting calls from customers from home in her slippers. He enumerates which are in his opinion the 3 eras of globalisation. He considers that the first one is when countries started to expand their territory to become more powerful and get more natural resources. The second era is represented by companies which became multinational companies, employing people from multiple countries. And third era is represented by individual collaboration, getting mentorship online from a person who you never met and he is from the other side of the planet.
In the second chapter he enumerates the ten forces that flatten the world. First of them is when the Berlin wall was taken down, second one was the dot com bubble. When Netscape went public and people spent their money investing a lot of money in the company, money which Netscape used to connect via optical fiber America and China thus enabling the internet to be accessible over the globe. The third force is the improvement of workflow using applications like Microsoft products, Word, Excel and so on. Forth is uploading which enables persons to collaborate and work on the same files and projects. Fifth one is outsourcing, sixth is offshoring which means that a company moved its whole fabric to a country with cheaper labor. Seventh is the open sourcing which enabled the creation of linux as we know it today. Then next ones are of supply chaining used by Wallmart, insourcing which is something UPS does, basically many companies are only doing marketing and via insourcing they pay companies like UPS to create their products. Next force is informing enabled by companies like Google. And then there are the steroids like firesharing and others which are charging all the ways of collaboration.
In the third chapter, called the triple convergence, he talks about the way everything meets together and enables this flattening of the world. Afterwards he talks about how “we all have to learn how to horizontalize, and take advantage of this platform” to become the most productive. Friedman proclaimed that this shift, from vertical to horizontal, “is the most fundamental transformation in human interaction since Gutenberg invented the Printing press.”
In the end of his talk he answers some good questions like “What is the role of under developed countries?”, “What is the role of MIT in this event?”. During his talk he also emphasises that we need to educate people to use their imagination in a positive way because this transformations enables on one hand terrorist organisations to do more harm but on another hand it enables people, with positive thinking, to do amazing things.
Friedman’s talk was amazing and brought a lot of value into my way of thinking and understanding how the world works. I am looking forward to read his book “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century“.
I hope that you enjoyed the summary and I strongly encourage you to watch the video and read the book.
