The World is Flat

Information for this page was taken from The World is Flat - A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman - Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005: New York

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 in Africa 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.

The Metaphor of a Flat World

Friedman uses the metaphor of a "flat world" to help describe his interpretation of globalization. He makes the point that the world is entering into a phase where almost everything will be digitized, virtualized, and automatized, and that those countries that can absorb the new technologies will experience staggering gains in productivity. Friedman opines that the world is entering into phase where more people than ever before will have access to the technological tools - as innovators, as collaborators, and even as terrorists. Friedman describes the flattening of the world as a watershed moment in history because the changes it will produce are so sweeping, multifaceted and hard to predict. According to Friedman, the change to a "flat world" differs from previous revolutions because it is happening at warp speed and directly or indirectly touches many more people on the planet than any previous large-scale change. In "The World is Flat", Friedman offers a framework for how to think about and manage the challenges presented by the flattening of the world. The approaches to responding to the challenges, especially in the field of education, are critical to understand, with nothing less than the future of American society hanging in the balance.

Ten Forces that Flattened the World

Fall of the Berlin Wall & The Graphical User Interface

On 11/9/89 the Berlin Wall fell opening up many of the world's closed economies and removing significant geopolitical boundaries. Capital economies flourished when, soon, there was a deunification of the Soviet Union; and when India, China, and other countries enter the global business stage as high-stakes players, which also exposed their tremendous talent. A critical mass of personal computers and the Windows operating system that brought them to life, came together in roughly the same time period that the wall fell. It greatly enhanced personal information gathering and personal empowerment. The diffusion of prsonal computers, fax machines, Windows, and dia-up modems conected to a global telephone netowrk all came together in the lat 1980s and early 1990s to crate the basic platform that started the global information revolution.

Netscape goes public

On August 9, 1995, the Internet land rush is officially on. The Netscape browser not only brought the Internet alive but also made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to eighty-five year olds. The more alive the Internet became, the more consumers wanted to do differnt things on the Web, so the more they demanded computers, software, and telecommunications networks that could easily digitize words, music, data, and photos and transport them on the Internet to anyone else's computer. Software booms, business Websites go up overnight, and networks and infrastructure grow like mushrooms. Thousands of miles of high-speed fiber are laid far ahead of the demand, which can be used today for nearly cost-free global connectivity.

Workflow software

With a basic Internet infrastructure now in place, the world needed two things: programmers and computing standards. Programmers would write the new software to take advantage of the connected world, and open standards would allow the network to expand. From this work, a flat world platform emerges.

Open sourcing

This brought us intellectual collaboration, setting the cornerstone for how application development and related technologies can evolve and improve outside proprietary structures, using distributed development teams.

Outsourcing

India takes a larger role on the world stage. Frenetic Y2K activity develops a tremendous pool of technical talent focused on ~dot.com apps that needed development, along with applications of fine-grained components.

Offshoring

China takes its own larger place on the stage as a player in technology and business. What started as a desire to tap into opportunities in China turned into companies looking at leveraging China's vast resources and labor pool. And the benefit is bidirectional.

Supply chaining

With the infrastructure and models maturing, we begin to see more companies refocusing on their internal processes, and these processes break out of the bounds of the tradit* ional organization.

In-Sourcing

The next flattener gives companies the applications that allow them better information about how they work and how their customers work. For example, UPS changes from a package-delivery company to a logistics company. Asia Paint moves from being a paint reseller to a retail store management organization.

• In-forming

The steroids

The final flattener are the new muscles of the digital age, driving a realm of application-to-application and machine-to-machine communications. These include mobile, digital, RFID, etc.

Convergence I

The opening o fthe Berlin Wall, Netscape, work flow, outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, insourcing, supply chaining, in-forming, and the streroids amplifying them all reinforced one another, like complementary goods. They just needed time to converge and start to work together in a complementary, mutually enhancing fashion. That tippling point arrived sometime around the year 2000. The net result of this convergence was the creation of a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration - the sharing of knowledge and work - in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language. No, not everyone hs access yet to this platform, this playing field, but itis open today to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it ever before in the history of the world. The world has been flattened by the complementary convergence of the ten flatteners, creating a new global playing field for multiple forms of collaboration.

Convergence II

Introducing new techology alone is never enough. The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business. Many of the ten flatteners have been around for years. But for the full flattening effects to be felt, the ten flatteners had to converge, plus something else - the emergence of a large cadre of mangers, innovators, business consultants, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEO's and workers to get comfortable with, and develop the sorts of horizontal collaboration and value-creation processes and habits that could take advantage of the new, flatter, playing field. The convergence of the ten flatteners begat the convergence of a set of business practices and skills that would get the most out of the flat world. Ant then the two began to mutially reinforce each other.

Convergence II**

Just as the new, more horizontal playing field was created, and companies and individuals, primarily in the West started quickly adapting to it, 3 billon people who had been frozen out of the field suddenly found themselves liberated to plug and play with everybody else. It is the triple convergence - of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration - that is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the 21st century. Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration, along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions of pages of raw information, ensures that the next generation of innovations will come from allover Planet Flat. The scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world has simply never seen before.

Rules for Coping with the Flat World

If you want to grow and flourish in a flat world, you better learn how to change and align yourself with it.

Reflections: How The World is Flat Connects

Resources for The World is Flat