The World Is Flat Summary

The World is Flat- In Ten Minutes or Less

Note: This is a summary of a speech I gave concerning Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat". Some things are abbreviated or shortened, but hopefully you can still gain the information.

Overview: Thomas L. Friedman is a foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and author of books such as the Lexus and the Olive Tree. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize three times. With such credentials, it is difficult to believe that he now claims that the world is flat. However, when he says the world is flat, it is like saying the world is shrinking. He is not talking about the physical shape of the earth, but rather the state of international relations. He is saying that the “global economic playing field is being leveled”. He talks about how the world has progressed, breaking globalization into three stages and defining the ten factors of the third stage.

Lesson One: The World Up to Now

- Globalization 1.0 (1492-1800’s) “You went global through your country”. Countries began to flatten the world, going global for various reasons.

- Globalization 2.0 (1800’s-2000) Companies go global. “You went global through your company”. Companies tried to find cheaper labor, better markets, etc.

- Globalization 3.0 (Present) Individuals. “Individuals of every color of the rainbow, who will be able to plug and play”.

Lesson Two: The Flatteners

- 11/9/89. The Berlin Wall fell. Allowed the world to be viewed, “as a single flat plane”. Enabled globalization. No longer was the world divided into north, south, east, and west. Windows 3.0 shipped five months after the fall of the wall, further enabling the flattening of the world.

- 8/9/95. Netscape went public. The first commercial web browser, allowed everybody to access the internet, from corporations to children. Enabled person-to-person connections. Triggered the dot-com boom, dot-com bubble, trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable. This cable connected the world, allowed for faster, cheaper, more efficient communication. The cables that have been laid allow for practically free, unlimited communications.

- Workflow. Application-to-application connections. “The Genesis moment of the Flatworld”. Combined with the Netscape flattener, creates a “global platform for multiple forms of collaboration”.

- Outsourcing. Made possible and extremely practical by this platform.

- Offshoring. Moving factories to other countries.

- Open-sourcing. Software created by individuals, moderated by individuals, for free. Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, Firefox. “It’s hard to beat free”. Made possible by the platform. Enabled collaboration between individuals all across the world on a scale that was never seen before.

- Supply chaining. Wal-mart, designing an extremely efficient global supply chain. “If Wal-mart were a country, it would be China’s eighth largest trading partner”. New form of collaboration.

- Insourcing. UPS. Internal logistics. Toshiba laptop breaks, they say take it to the UPS store. Goes from UPS store to UPS hub in Louisville, Kentucky, where it is repaired by a UPS employee. Nike.com insources its warehouses to UPS. Papa John’s has insourced the delivery of its dough from bakeries to restaurants to UPS. Over time, one of the larger flattener. “Hundreds of companies that no longer touch any of their products”.

- Informing. What Thomas Friedman calls Google. Search for information, the ability to inform oneself.

- “The Steroids”. Wireless, voice over the internet, file sharing. “Turbo charging all six new forms of collaborations” so they can be done from anywhere in the world from a mobile device.

Lesson Three: It all comes together.

1. All ten flatteners converged. (2000) All of the flattening factors began to work together, complementing each other. This created a global platform for collaboration that could transcend time, distance, geography, and even language. This platform is the Flatworld, and can be used to explain any modern economic occurrences.

2. Horizontalization. The adaption of business, study, and innovative habits to a world based on connections and collaboration instead of a world based on vertical top-down institutions. Will increase the flattening of the world, as more and more processes become based upon connecting and collaborating with people around the world. Southwest Airline ticket, E-ticket, printed tickets example.

3. Three new economies. China, India, former Soviet Union. Three billon people “step onto the playing field”. Even if only ten percent are capable of participating in the new plug and play world, that’s three hundred million people, more than twice the size of the American work force as of 2005.

Lesson Four: “Nobody’s told the kids”

-People know about the flattening of the world, but are reluctant to recognize it.

-Presidential election of 2004 put the focus on America only, when it should have acknowledged the platforms and factors that have been, and will continue to, flatten the world.

The Rest: The remainder of Thomas Friedman’s book focuses on what the flattening of the world means for America, and what it means for the developing world. Friedman also discusses geopolitics, stating that when the world is flat, the slightest of variations can take a country like Mexico which borders the US and make it a thousand miles away, and a country like China which is a thousand miles away and make it border the US. He spends the rest of the book applying his view of the flat world to the entire world, however he places the greatest significance on the first three chapters of his book.

The Verdict: I recommend that you get yourself a copy of the book and read it.