Book title:
“The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”
Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2005.
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I don’t care particularly for the first pages of the book, but it is becoming
more interesting, and sometimes very interesting, as one progresses,
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Interesting excerpts:
– Page 176, on Flattening the World: “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.”
– The Monitor is Burning, pages 21-29, on Indian Call Centers; – Homesourcing,
pages 36-38;
– Flatburgers and fries, pages 40-42, on fusing McDonnanlds and call center
services;
– On Work Flow software, page 80:
“Work flow platforms are enabling us to do for the service industry what Henry
Ford did for manufacturing” said Jerry Rao, the enterpreneur doing accounting
work for Americans from India. “We are taking apart each task and sending it
around to whomever can do it best, and because we are doing it in a virtual
environment, people need not be physically adjacent to each other, and then we
are reassembling all the pieces back together at headquarters or some other
remote site. This is not a trivial revolution. This is a major one. These
workflow software platforms enable you to create virtual global offices – not
limited by either the boundaries of your office or your country – and to access
talent sitting in different parts of the world and have them complete tasks
that you need completed in real time. And so 24/7/365 we are all working. And
all this has happened in the twinkling of an eye – the span of the last two or
three years.”
– From the Table of Contents: Open-Sourcing, Outsourcing, Offshoring,
Supply-Chaining, Insourcing, In-forming, …
– Supply-Chaining in Wal-mart (the good and the bad), page 128-141;
– Insourcing in UPS, pages 141-150;
– In-Forming in Google, pages 150-159;
– Educational Heritage, in India, China and Russia, page 183, first paragraph;
– Boeing watching its suppliers bid down against each other, page 196, last
paragraph;
– “Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in
this new era. ,,, flattening was actually first identified by Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto, published in 1948: the inexorable
march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions,
and restraints to global commerce.” page 201 (end) to page 202 (beginning).
– “Some obstacles to a frictionless global market are truly sources of waste
and lost opportunities. But some of these inefficiencies are institutions,
habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they
reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith and national
pride. … Some sources of friction are worth protecting, even in the face of a
global economy that threatens to flatten them.” page 204, middle to end.
– “The cold, hard truth is that management, sharerholders, and investors are
largely indifferent to where their profits come from or even where the
employment is created. But they do want sustainable companies. Politicians,
though, are compelled to stimulate the creation of jobs in a certain place.
And residents – whether they are Americans, Europeans, or Indians – want to
know that the good jobs are going to stay close to home.” page 211, close to
top.
– “It’s hard to create a human bond with e-mail and streaming Internet. ,.. It
is like they have cut all the fat out of the business and turned everything
into a numbers game. But fat is what gives meat its taste. The leanest cuts of
meat don’t taste very good. You want it marbled with at least a little fat.”
page 220, below middle.
– “Politics in the flat world will consist of asking which values, frictions,
and fats are worth preserving – which should, in Marx’s language, be kept solid
– and which must be left to melt away into the air. … Countries, companies,
and individuals will be able to give intelligent answers (make sound political
choices) only if they fully appreciate the flattened playing field and
understand all the new tools now available to them for collaborating and
competing on it.” page 222.
– “In a flat world, not only are goods tradable, but many services have become
tradable as well.” page 227, above middle.
– “What is happening to services today is the same thing that happened in
manufacturing as trade barriers were lowered.” page 213, first paragraph.
– A new business that involves a combination of math and marketing: “study the
algorithms being used by the major search engines and then design marketing and
Web strategies that will push you up the ranking.” page 233, below middle.
– “What do we tell our kids?… my advice to them in this flat world is very
brief and very blant:”Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to
me, “Tom, finish your dinner – people in China and India are starving.” My
advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework – people in China and India are
starving for your jobs.” page 237, lower half.
– The Untouchables: people whose jobs cannot be outsourced. page 238, top.
– It starts with (America’s) research universities, which spin off a steady
stream of competitive experiments, innovations, and scientific breakthroughs –
from mathematics to biology to physics to chemistry. It is a truism, but the
more educated you are, the more options you will have in a flat world. …
America has 4,000 colleges and universities, the rest of the world combined has
7,768 institutions of higher education. In the state of California alone there
are about 130 colleges and universities. There are only 14 countries in the
world that have more than than that number.” page 244, lower half.
– “There is one world of science out there, and this kind of international
division of labor makes a lot of sense.” page 248, below middle.
– The best metaphore for the way the rest of the world can now compete
head-to-head more effectively than ever with America is the struggle of the
U.S. Olympic basketball team … ” page 250, top.
– “When you take a low-wage, low-prestige job in America, like a call center
operator, and bring it to India, where it becomes a high-wage, high-prestige
job, you end up with workers who are paid less but motivated more.” page 260,
bottom.
