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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A More Rounded View, 1 Aug 2006
Other Amazon readers' reviews put me right off this book (all over in 10 pages etc). But my boss asked me to read it, so I persevered. I'm glad I did. Despite the 569 pages (not including anything so outmoded as a bibliography), and despite the many and often very lengthy examples and case-studies, not to mention the long quotes from other writers, there are important messages in this book. It's a good speed-read, if you get my drift. I recommend it on that basis.
Freidman makes a bold claim. Around 2000 a triple convergeance occurred which created a new historical era. Ten flatteners (i.e. changes) created a new, flatter, global playing field. Businesses and individuals (especially would-be zippies from India, China and the former Soviet Union) began to move from vertical to horizontal ways of creating value (i.e. doing business). People suddenly gained access to the flat world platform. Walls, ceiling and floors blew away. Out went command and control. In came connect and collaborate. Noone knows anymore who is exploiting who. Our jobs are being digitalized, automated and outsourced. To survive as a new untouchable middler you'd better become a great orchestrator, synthesizer, explainer, leverager, adapter, or a passionate personaliser. Failing that, just be brilliant, like Madonna or a cancer specialist. Failing that, just be well anchored, like a dustman.
Ok, I parody rather than paraphrase. Readable it always isn't. But that's got most of the bad stuff out of the way. Not all the quotes are bad: "It is a difference of degree so great - of low-cost interconnectivity, of individual empowerment, of global newworks for collaboration - that it is a difference in kind." This it least a bold and stimulating claim which is worthy of examination.
Freidman's central case is that in the first great age of globalisation, it was countries/ governments who first began to establish global collaborative links. Then it was companies. Now it's individuals. To put it another way, we've gone from hunting, to agriculture, to manufacturing industry, to services, to services delivered globally. To put it really badly, in a phrase that irritatingly won't leave my head, the Berlin Wall has become the Berlin Mall.
But aside from the central thesis there are some illuminating passages. Friedman gave me a lot of insight into terrorists. Typically, they are young, male, well-educated but also alienated by impersonal global economic changes and forces which affront their personal and cultural dignity and threaten their identity. Freidman calls them "neo-Leninists" and compares them with their 19th century European counterparts, the violent liberal, Marxist or anarchist revolutionaries, educated, middle class but displaced by industrialisation. This is a real historical insight. Also useful is the account of how terrorists utilise the new global platform. Bin Laden and friends used the internet to create their sinister and deadly "airline." The e bay praise points system is also interestingly analysed, as is the history of the anti-globalisation movement.
Freidman is not as naive about the new globalisation as some reviewers claim. He sees the dangers, of which the "Virtual Caliphate" is only one. But globalisation needn't mean Americanisation. It needn't destroy cultural identities because crucially, he argues, we can upload as well as download. The local can go global. We can all be players.
In what should be read as the companion volume, Evelyn Waugh's satire on journalism, "Scoop" (1939), inept foreign correspondents communicate from Africa to home via hilariously garbled telegrams. More global communication is probably not an unqualified good. But how great is the opposite?
But has the new connectivity really created Freidman's new global historical era? Waugh warns "of the innuendo and intricate misrepresentations, the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history", not to mention "the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise of screw." Maybe the world isn't flat. But read this book anyway to learn more about what's been happening globally in the past five minutes. Which is quite a lot. Please excuse me now, time to upload.
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61 of 69 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"God Bless America", 9 Oct 2006
A member of the U.S. Congess donated a photograph to a local shop in Cape Town. He wrote across the bottom: "God bless America." Little did he understand what these words would mean in Cape Town: "America? Should God not bless the world?" The photograph would seem an appropriate metaphor for this book. The idea for the book was born when author Tom Friedman, a celebrated journalist, investigated outsourcing to India -- proof that "intellectual capital" may be delivered "from anywhere". As a result, he considered that "the global competitive playing field was being leveled" -- and decided to pursue the trend.
Is the world really flat (or flattening)? Is it flattening competitively, as Friedman suggests? Early on in the book, Friedman alluded to the dark side of such "flattening". He wrote: "But contemplating the flat world also filled me with dread . . ." My own first thoughts were: "Perhaps he thinks of the avarice of the West, or the deceitfulness and destruction of empire?" Yet he was thinking exclusively of "Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks". This seemed bound to be a one-dimensional book. Did his attitude change as he developed his theme? Essentially, no. Some four hundred pages later, his main concern was "a fundamental interest in keeping the American dream alive".
Friedman considers that there have been "ten forces that flattened the world". #1. The "balance of power across the world" has tipped towards democracy. #2. "The computer and its connectivity [has become] inherently more useful for millions of people". #3. Connectivity has enabled "work flow" to be distributed worldwide. These flatteners, in turn, have empowered "new forms of collaboration", which represent Flatteners #4 to #9. Finally, Flattener #10 serves to amplify "all the other flatteners": the fast advancing digital revolution.
Friedman "always believed in free trade". Should he now? In Bangalore, he looked across "these Indian Zippies", and considered: "Oh, my God, there are so many of them." His first thought: he would not want "any American" to suffer. However, "the way to succeed is not by stopping the railroad line from connecting you, but by upgrading your skills and making the investment[s]". So the advantage comes down to skills and investments. I wondered whether Friedman missed a page in Economics 101, titled "Terms of Trade". He might have spotted the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and how industrialised countries, led by the U.S., opposed much of the agenda, tipping the world scales in their favour.
This book would seem to represent a sobering example of the propaganda of empire -- not to speak of how the deception of empire swallows those who indwell it. Not only is this a book by a celebrated journalist. He won the approval of the Pulitzer Prize committee three times -- which would represent, presumably, the opinions of a large swathe of the U.S.A. I had suspected that such thinking might exist in the U.S.A. This book provides disturbing insight.
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47 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Future of Global Competition, 29 May 2005
The World Is Flat is an easy, if long, read about the nature of global competition among countries, companies and individuals as circumstances stood in 2004.Let me describe his key points. Mr. Friedman begins by describing ten forces that were powerful in creating today's extreme business competition on a global scale (the fall of the Berlin Wall, advances in computer communications and software, reductions in cost to connect organizations together by computer-directed instructions, new ways of partnering and the rise of portable, real-time information access over the Internet). He then describes a triple convergence that has accelerated change: World-wide, real-time, flexible collaboration that allows more horizontal ways to provide value; companies learning how to use the new technologies to create new types of organizations, services and structures; and the entry of several billion new people into global business competition. Mr. Friedman goes on to describe the implications of the 2004 world for the future. He sees a need for more education, greater specialization, learning new skills and moving up the ladder of adding more value . . . or a job, a company or a country will see its position degraded or even replaced by a more effective competitor elsewhere. For the United States, he sees a "quiet crisis" as other nations outrace its citizens for advanced education and work harder to compete. Today's lead can soon become tomorrow's obsolescence. In the meantime, consumers will benefit from cheaper imported goods and offshore services. For developing countries, the challenge is greater. They were behind to start with. Mexico finds itself being displaced by China in serving the U.S. market, even though Mexico is right next door. The key task is to free local entrepreneurs to operate efficiently and to put good infrastructure and education in place. In geopolitics, much focus will turn to a fight over raw materials as developing nations add great needs for energy and the minerals and food needed to urbanize and industrialize. He also sees severe environmental problems ahead. The Muslim world is mostly seen as being left out . . . and becoming resentful . . . leading to more terrorism. Mr. Friedman also encourages companies and countries to find ways to open up this new world to the 3 billion poorest people. At the end, he describes a world of unbounded opportunity if we only have enough imagination to create a better future. Mr. Friedman is a good writer, a confessed humanist and a great teller of anecdotes. He traveled to many of the places he wrote about in the book which gives his story depth, color and texture. It also makes his messages more compelling and interesting. The book has three flaws that will bother many people. First, his points about global business competition are not new in any way. So this book will be largely a waste of time for those who have been following this development for some time. As a result, this book will be of most value to those who are new to the subject. Second, his central metaphor of a flat world doesn't really work. Mr. Friedman is arguing that we have a level global playing field except for some minor advantages that already exist (location, raw materials such as oil, education levels, computer and communications access, and knowledge of languages). If he had called the book "The Playing Field Is Level," that metaphor would have worked. He is also arguing that communications place us in great proximity to one another and that trend is continuing. From that observation, it's possible to see the world as a concave bowl with ever rising sides causing all of us to slide closer together at the bottom. "The World Is a Concave Bowl with Rising Sides" isn't much of a book title, so I can see why he avoided that metaphor. Nevertheless, the title metaphor is wrong and it's annoying to have to read so much about it throughout the book. I also found the cover illustration to be annoying for this reason. The world he is describing is one where sailing ships will founder because they cannot survive pitched battles with other sailing ships that have better guns and maneuverability . . . not one where some people are falling off the end of the earth. It's a great illustration . . . but for another book. Third, many of his solutions are more rhetorical than real. Mr. Friedman would have done better to seek out those who have created major solutions to difficult problems (such as the Grameen Bank in creating entrepreneurs among the impoverished) rather than to describe little experiments that companies have done. But the rhetoric will encourage you to think about what he has to say . . . and perhaps your imagination will be stimulated to see new ways you can contribute. If so, that would be good. Find new ways to achieve old objectives! And good luck to you as you do.
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by Thomas L. Friedman
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