The World Is Flat Book Review

Thomas Friedman – The World Is Flat

Introduction

The meeting between Thomas Friedman, a veteran award winning American journalist, and Nandan Nilekani, the then Chief Executive of Infosys, proved to be a catalyst for the making of ‘The World Is Flat’, an influential work on Globalization, written by Mr. Friedman. In essence, the book dwells on how globalization has provided the world a common platform for collaboration, and its impact on modern society.

Over the course of making a documentary on outsourcing, which at that time had happened to be at the center of a raging debate back home in the United States of America, Mr. Friedman conducted several interviews with Indians from across the business spectrum, in Bangalore, India. Towards the

Friedman proceeded to explain the underlying theme of his book, and dwelled elaborately on how he’d laid out the first few chapters.

His first chapter divides the progress of globalization in three stages, or “eras”. According to Mr. Friedman, the first era, Globalization 1.0, was characterized by countries and governments, who in their pursuit to colonize geographies spread out across continents, played their parts in bringing the world closer together.

Globalization 2.0 was dominated by large multinational companies like Microsoft Corporation, and Globalization 3.0 defined by individuals or groups, who have now embraced their ability to, “go global”, to quote Mr. Friedman, and establish a network of communication that spans continents.

Chapter 2 serves to answer the questions, ‘What created this flatness? What precipitated this increasingly inter connected environment that has enabled people to collaborate, the barriers of geography and borders notwithstanding.

Mr. Friedman lists ten factors that have directly contributed to this “flattening of the world”, as he puts it. He calls them the “10 flatteners”.

10

Friedman refers to as “The Triple Convergence”. The ten flatteners complemented each other, and combined to give rise to a web-enabled global society, and the increasingly synchronized collaboration between people that resulted from this shared platform, constitutes the ‘first convergence’. Every time the global landscape is revolutionized, just as it has now by globalization as it had been by the advent of electricity, people need to, as Mr. Friedman puts it, “horizontalise” themselves. Meaning, the society as a whole, needs to adapt to the changes that have wrought by globalization, in order to be better equipped to handle the transition to a better, and more challenging, way of life. Mr. Friedman calls this the ‘second convergence’.

Companies are now free to assemble a workforce spread around the world, freed from the confines of location and logistics. Outsourcing has now enabled industries to actually pick and choose from a globally diversified talent pool, without being hindered by factors like distance. Companies like Walmart have become so effective in operating across the globe, they’ve now set a new benchmark for ‘supply chain