Someone on a mailing list I'm on passed along the URL to the article "It's a Flat World, After All," by Thomas L. Friedman, author of "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," from which the article is adapted (and which is now on my list of "books to read").
Friedman has quite a lot of interesting things to say in his seven web pages about the current status of the globalization process that started when Columbus safely returned home (thereby proving the world was round). ;This event kicked off an era where countries were globalizing for resources and imperial conquest, followed by the industrial revolution starting an era where companies were globalizing for markets and labor, and lead inexorably to the information era, where technology has "leveled the field" enabling individuals and small groups to globalize.
Around about the third page of the article, Friedman poses the question "How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?" He follows that up with a list of 10 events and forces, that all occurred or came together during the 1990’s, converging right around 2000. The first three world flatteners "created the new platform for collaboration":
- Nov 9, 1989 – The Berlin Wall Comes Down (and Microsoft Windows 3.0 goes up)
- Aug 9, 1995 – Netscape Goes Public (bringing the internet and the dot-com boom with it)
- Workflow Revolution – Application to Application infrastructure (Enables outsourcing Y2K bug fixes to Indian engineers)
The next six world flatteners were the new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge using the platform the first three created:
- Outsourcing – work could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper
- Off-shoring – send the whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China
- Open-sourcing – whole new operating systems are written by engineers collaborating online and working for no pay.
- Insourcing – let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my logistics operations
- Supply-chaining – create a global supply chain so efficient that when an item is sold in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (This is Wal-Mart’s specialty)
- Informing – allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves (This is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search)
The tenth and final world flattener, he called "The Steroids":
- Wireless and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – the other collaboration methods areturbocharged: you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device
Friedman follows up his discussion of these ten "World Flatteners" with the following quote:
<quote>
The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.
</quote>
As if the leveling of the playing field was not enough on its own, Friedman points out another convergence that occurred at roughly the same time: The three billion new players who walked, and often ran, from the sidelines and straight into the game. That is, all the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia who were suddenly no longer restricted from joining the free market after their economies and political systems opened up during the course of the 1990's.
>Friedman does go on to note that not everyone has access to this platform yet, but more people have access to it in more places on more days than ever before, and it the numbers are only increasing across the board with time. What I found particularly interesting was his and others thoughts that the so-called "IT Revolution" of the past 20 years was nothing more than the warm-up act – the first steps that forged, sharpened and distributed all the tools the world needed to collaborate and connect. The main act is only just beginning as we move on into the era where technology REALLY transforms every aspect of business, government, society and life.
Another quote that caught my attention:
<quote>
When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.
</quote>
This got me thinking about how this trend is already changing immigration patterns into countries like the USA and Canada. There are tough requirements in these countries around who they will allow a company to bring in to work – ostensibly to protect their own citizens from the risk of loosing job opportunities to someone from another country. But, what happens when the companies really do not need to bring the people in to the country to get the work done? When the better educated, gung-ho people are not here but there? The jobs will be lost just the same – in fact, even more so. There are, of course, rules and regulations regarding what kind of offshore holdings a company can legally have, or how much offsite consulting they can legally utilize, but I wonder if, in the long run, this kind of locked down policing of global employment will do more harm than good?
You can already see this happening with help lines – you are more likely to get someone with a "friendly Indian lilt" answering your request for help, especially outside of North American working hours (8am EST to 6pm PST), than someone living closer to home, when you call a 24/7 help line. Even at Microsoft, we have staff working our internal corporate technical help desk lines in India in addition to staff in Denver, Colorado and some city in California. Truthfully, it does makes sense – over there, they are just waking up while, over here, it’s after dinner and we’re just trying to download our email or copy a document off of the corporate network Why hire people to work a "graveyard shift" when there are humans who can do the work as a "morning shift"?
Another quote, this one from Rajesh Rao, a young Indian Entrepreneur that Friedman spoke with, digs into the issue much more deeply:
There is no time to rest. That is gone. There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray: you shake it, and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs – they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity.
...
[Americans and Western Europeans would] be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining -- we have never seen that before.
As Friedman says, "This is Not a Test" – it is time for the United States (and its cadres) to wake up and take a good long look at the other kids on the playground and in the classrooms. It will not be long before just getting by, by doing what has always been done and always worked, will not even get a "Satisfactory" grade from the World-at-Large.
We need to get going immediately. It takes 15 years to train a good engineer, because, ladies and gentlemen, this really is rocket science. So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, "Tom, finish your dinner -- people in China are starving." But after sailing to the edges of the flat world for a year, I am now telling my own daughters, "Girls, finish your homework -- people in China and India are starving for your jobs."
I don’t know about you, but I’m already sitting on the edge of my seat, popcorn and a Coca-Cola in hand. The previews have ended, the digital sound check is just fading away, and the movie studio logo is rolling. In the next 10 to 20 years, there is going to be a spectacular, mind-blowing show unfolding around us. I sure wouldn’t miss this for anything in the world. Besides, I have a vested interest – I am expecting to write a line or two of the screenplay after all. ;-D
--
Jenni A. M. Merrifield =:= strawberryJAMM
