Monthly Special Feature

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

To help the kids I teach at Monmouth University, I read a paragraph or two from this book to give them some idea of the world they will be careering into. I encourage you to read it…Times, they are a’changin…

Chapter three is called "The Ten Forces that Flattened the World." This is Friedman’s attempt to explain what the forces were that created this flat playing field.

DAY 1: The first flattener is 11/9—not 9/11, 11/9. In a wonderful cabalistic accident of dates, the Berlin Wall came down on 11/9, November 9, 1989. The fall of the Wall was a huge flattener. Before then, you could not have a global policy. You could have an Eastern policy, you could have a Western policy, but it was very hard to have a global policy when there was a wall in the way. Windows operating system 3.0 shipped six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

DAY 2: The second flattener occurred on 8/9/95. August 9, 1995, is the day a small company in Mountain View, California, called Netscape, went public. Netscape's IPO was a transformative day in our lifetime, for three reasons:

• Netscape going public gave us the Internet browser. 
• It gave us a set of transmission protocols, kind of digital pipes that commercialized a set of open standards that really made the Internet interoperable. 
• Third and most importantly, Netscape triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the crazy, wild, ridiculous, massive overinvestment in fiber-optic cable—$1 trillion in five years. 

The accidental result was that within five years of Netscape going public, Bangalore and Beijing and the Bronx had become next-door neighbors. People were able to connect with people elsewhere like never before.

DAY 3: The next flattener was workflow. All the software and standards that connected all that bandwidth from those fiber-optic cables with all those PCs. Applications were now talking to applications. Suddenly we could work together in whole new ways.

DAY 4: The first new form of collaboration was outsourcing. Suddenly, when people-to-people and application-to-application can connect, I can move it anywhere—where the most efficient, effective or cheapest producer can operate it.

DAY 5: The second new form of collaboration was offshoring, when I take my factory from Canton, Ohio, and move it lock, stock and barrel to Canton, China, where it then gets integrated into my whole production operation.

DAY 6: The third great new form of collaboration is open sourcing. Wikipedia is an open-source dictionary and encyclopedia, where people simply contribute the entries on their own. It is self-corrective. It may be the main post-industrial forum of creative innovation.

DAY 7: The fourth new form of collaboration is supply-chaining…..Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has designed a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency, so if you take an item off the shelf in Brooklyn, another is immediately made in Shenzhen, China. 

DAY 8: The fifth new form of collaboration that sprung off this platform is insourcing……UPS. What UPS does now is go inside your company and take over your whole internal logistics operation right up to your neck. There are whole companies today who never touch their products anymore. They have been completely insourced to UPS or FedEx or DHL. 

DAY 9: The last new form of collaboration is informing, what Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search do. They allow you to collaborate now with data all by yourself. You are able to mine all your data all by myself. 

DAY 10: The tenth Friedman simply calls the "steroids." The steroids are voice-over-the-Internet and wireless. What the steroids are doing is turbocharging all six of these new forms of collaboration and now allowing you to do any one from anywhere with any device.

What does all of this mean? Tom Friedman believes and I agree “…it means that we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network, which–if politics and terrorism do not get in the way–could usher in an amazing era of prosperity and innovation.” From our lips to God’s ear…