The Flatteners Chapter Summary
While making documentaries for discovery channel, Thomas Friedman got an idea to go to call centres across the world and document young people on America’s standing. He says that Globalization took over when he was sleeping and that he couldn’t explain it. Tom travels to Bangalore and meets Nandan Nilekani who casually mentions that the world's economic playing field was being levelled. This propelled him to write a book on globalization and outsourcing called “The world is flat”.
The Flatteners
The book is about two main themes: The 10 flatteners and the effects of flattening on the world (triple convergence).
It describes the journey from Globalization 2.0, spearheaded and dominated by companies to Globalization 3.0 where individuals are …show more content…
the agents of change.
Tom discusses funny tales about UPS and JetBlue.
He also cites examples of McDonald’s drive-thru orders being processed by a call centre hundreds of miles away. The order is ready a few minutes later as one drives around to the pickup window. He recounts his conversation with a JetBlue personnel and depicts how a Toshiba laptop gets fixed when shipped through UPS.
Each of the 10 factors and how they have worked to increase competition or “flatten the world is described in detail.
Tom’s 1st flattener states that the fall of berlin wall in 1989 paved way for a flat world and lead to the spread of the Windows operating system. This comparison is disappointing and irrelevant.
The next one is the rise of the internet brought about by the public offering of Netscape stock in 1995. This was a huge factor that contributed to dotcom bubble. It triggered global interconnectedness and made cities across continents next door neighbours.
The other flatteners described in the book are workflow software which enables work sharing and the development of virtual applications that allows computers to talk with one another; open-sourcing that made the source code available to the public for free and offshoring that takes the flattening process to a whole new level.
Friedman stresses on the importance of outsourcing to an extent in this book by citing how US needed India’s skilled technologists to fix the Y2K
bug.
The concept of supply chaining is explained by Friedman as he provides an example of how Wal-Mart automatically orders stock refills as soon as an item is sold. He also reports a UPS story and Google as samples for Insourcing and Informing flatteners respectively.
The last flattener is new communications technology like Wireless, VOIP, Napster and Bit Torrent. These technologies are supposedly called steroids by Friedman because they seem to expand and boost all other flatteners.
A new world full of opportunities and competition exists. China and India have an advantage over other countries from the flat world. Friedman understands that China and India pose great challenges to the developed world. The changes he has described have an effect of adding hundreds of billions of people to the world economy.
The Flatteners
The book is about two main themes: The 10 flatteners and the effects of flattening on the world (triple convergence).
It describes the journey from Globalization 2.0, spearheaded and dominated by companies to Globalization 3.0 where individuals are …show more content…
the agents of change.
Tom discusses funny tales about UPS and JetBlue.
He also cites examples of McDonald’s drive-thru orders being processed by a call centre hundreds of miles away. The order is ready a few minutes later as one drives around to the pickup window. He recounts his conversation with a JetBlue personnel and depicts how a Toshiba laptop gets fixed when shipped through UPS.
Each of the 10 factors and how they have worked to increase competition or “flatten the world is described in detail.
Tom’s 1st flattener states that the fall of berlin wall in 1989 paved way for a flat world and lead to the spread of the Windows operating system. This comparison is disappointing and irrelevant.
The next one is the rise of the internet brought about by the public offering of Netscape stock in 1995. This was a huge factor that contributed to dotcom bubble. It triggered global interconnectedness and made cities across continents next door neighbours.
The other flatteners described in the book are workflow software which enables work sharing and the development of virtual applications that allows computers to talk with one another; open-sourcing that made the source code available to the public for free and offshoring that takes the flattening process to a whole new level.
Friedman stresses on the importance of outsourcing to an extent in this book by citing how US needed India’s skilled technologists to fix the Y2K
bug.
The concept of supply chaining is explained by Friedman as he provides an example of how Wal-Mart automatically orders stock refills as soon as an item is sold. He also reports a UPS story and Google as samples for Insourcing and Informing flatteners respectively.
The last flattener is new communications technology like Wireless, VOIP, Napster and Bit Torrent. These technologies are supposedly called steroids by Friedman because they seem to expand and boost all other flatteners.
A new world full of opportunities and competition exists. China and India have an advantage over other countries from the flat world. Friedman understands that China and India pose great challenges to the developed world. The changes he has described have an effect of adding hundreds of billions of people to the world economy.