Book Summary: The World is Flat (Thomas L.

Friedman)
By Mike Lee

The Ten Forces That Flattened the World

These are the ten factors describing how the world is becoming flat or globally interconnected,
thereby allowing businesses all over the world to compete on a more equal playing field.
1. The New Age of Creativity (the fall of the Berlin Wall)
This event tipped the balance of power across the world toward those advocating
democratic, consensual, free-market-oriented governance, and away from those
advocating authoritarian rule with centrally planned economies.
2. The New Age of Connectivity (the rise of the Web)
This event enabled more people to communicate and interact with more other people
anywhere on the planet than ever before.
3. Work Flow Software
This force enabled more people in more places to design, display, manage, and
collaborate on business data previously handled manually, resulting in more work to be
able to flow between companies and continents faster than ever.
4. Uploading (open online collaboration and communities)
This force gave newfound power [to] individuals and communities to send up, out, and
around their own products and ideas, often for free, rather than just passively
downloading them from commercial enterprises or traditional hierarchies, thereby
reshaping the flow of creativity, innovation, political mobilization, and information
gathering and dissemination.
5. Outsourcing

This force meant taking some specific, but limited, function that your company is doing
in-house and having another company perform that exact same function for you and
then reintegrating their work back into your overall operation.
6. Offshoring
This force meant being able to manufacture the very same product in the very same way,
only with cheaper labor, lower taxes, subsidized energy, and lower health-care costs in
another country, then integrating it into [your] global supply chains.
7. Supply-Chaining
This force allowed [horizontal collaboration]among suppliers, retailers, and
customersto create value, resulting in the adoption of common standards between
companies and more efficient global collaboration.
8. Insourcing
This force allowed small companies could suddenly see around the world and sell their
products and services globally, while large companies could act really small and
customize products at the last minute.
9. In-forming
This force gave all the worlds knowledge, or even just a big chunk of it to anyone
and everyone, anytime, anywhere, resulting in becoming your own self-directed and
self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment, without having to go to
the library or the movie theater or through network television.
10. The Steriods (computers, the Internet, wireless, and personalization)
This force, made up of specific technologies, supercharged all the other flatteners.

The Triple Convergence

These are the three factors that came together to set off the flattening of the world.
1. Convergence I
This is the convergence of the ten flatteners [into] a whole new platform. It is a global,
Web-enabled platform for multiple forms of collaboration [that] enables individuals,
groups, companies, and universities anywhere in the world to collaborate without
regard to geography, distance, time, and, in the near future, even language for the
purposes of innovation, production, education, research, entertainment, and, alas, warmakinglike no creative platform ever before.

2. Convergence II
This is the emergence of a large cadre of managers, innovators, business consultants,
business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs, and workers.
3. Convergence III
This is the creation of horizontal collaboration and value-creation processes and habits
that could take advantage of this new, flatter playing field.

The Great Sorting Out

These are the issues that will need to be resolved in the flat world.
1. Offshoring: Who is Exploiting Who?
This is where the world starts to flatten out and value increasingly gets created
horizontally who is on the top and who is on the bottom, who is the exploiter and who
is the exploited, gets very complicated. The US workers who are out of jobs? The US
customers and citizens who pay lower prices and less taxes? The Indian workers who are
paid comparably low wages? The Indian workers whos comparably low wages raises
their standard of living?
2. Where Do Companies Stop and Start?
This is where businesses define their interests and labor opportunities more globally
than domestically [and than where they are headquartered], and the whole shareholding
process demands more and more that these companies perform against global standards,
opportunities, and resources.
3. From Command and Control to Collaborate and Connect
This is where hierarchies are not being leveled just by little people being able to act big.
They are also being leveled by big people being able to act really smallin the sense that
they are enabled to do many more things on their own.
4. Multiple Identity Disorder
This is where the tensions among our identities as consumers, employees, citizens,
taxpayers, and shareholders are going to come into sharper and sharper conflict. For
instance, the Wal-Mart shareholder and shopper in us wans Wal-Mart to be [keep
company profits high] and prices low. But the Wal-Mart worker in us hates the limited
benefits and low pay packages. And the Wal-Mart citizen in us knows that because
[Wal-Mart doesn't fully cover employee health care costs], the taxpayers will end up
picking up the tab.

5. Who Owns What?

This is where we need to decide whether we build legal barriers to protect an
innovators intellectual property so he or she can reap its financial benefits and plow
those profits into a new invention, [or] keep [the] walls low enough so that we encourage
the sharing of intellectual property, which is required more and more to do cutting-edge
innovation.
6. Death of the Salesmen
This is where efficiency and automation is replacing human beings. Its hard to create a
human bond with e-mail and streaming Internet.

America and Free Trade

This is the idea that even as the world gets flat, America as a whole will benefit more by
sticking to the general principles of free trade, as it always has, than by trying to erect walls,
which will only provoke others to do the same and impoverish us all. And while protectionism
would be counter-productive, a policy of free trade, while necessary, is not enough by itself. It
must be accompanied by a focused domestic strategy aimed at upgrading the education of every
American, so that he or she will be able to compete for the new jobs in the flat world.

The New Middlers

These are the job categories that will make up the new middle-class in the flat world.
1. Great Collaborators and Orchestrators
These are jobs that involve collaborating with others or orchestrating collaboration
within and between companies, especially those employing diverse workforces from
around the world.
2. The Great Synthesizers
These are jobs that involve putting together disparate things that you would not think of
as going together.
3. The Great Explainers
These are jobs that involve [seeing] the complexity but [explaining] it with simplicity.
4. The Great Leveragers
These are jobs that involve combining the best of what computers can do with the best
of what humans can do, and then constantly reintegrating the new best practices the

humans are innovating back into the system to make the whole that much more
productive.
5. The Great Adapters
These are jobs that involve being adaptable and versatile and are capable not only of
constantly adapting but also of constantly learning and growing.
6. The Green People
These are jobs that involve designing and building renewable energies and
environmentally sustainable systems.
7. The Passionate Personalizers
These are jobs that involve pure passion pure entertainment [and] a creative touch
that no one else thought of adding.
8. The Great Localizers
These are jobs that involve [understanding] the emerging global infrastructure, and then
[adapting] all the new tools it offers to local needs and demands.

The Right Stuff

These are the abilities that will help individuals compete effectively in the flat world.
1. Learn How to Learn
This is the ability to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things
or new ways of doing new things.
2. Passion and Curiosity
This is the ability to be passionate and curious for a job, for success, for a subject area or
even a hobby, because nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.
3. Play Well With Others
This is the ability to be good at managing or interacting with other people.
4. The Right-Brain Stuff
This is the ability to nurture more of your right brain [(creative thought)] as well as your
left [(analytical thought)].

The Quiet Crisis

These are the six dirty little secrets of the US that are preventing this country from properly
preparing for the flat world.
1. The Numbers Gap
The generation of scientists and engineers who were motivated to go into science are
reaching their retirement years and are not being replaced in the numbers that they must
be if an advanced economy like that of the United States is to remain at the head of the
pack.
2. The Education Gap at the Top
We simply are not educating, or even interesting, enough of our own young people in
advanced math, science, and engineering.
3. The Ambition Gap
Not only is [outsourcing] cheaper and efficient, but the quality and productivity [boost]
is huge because of our love of television and video and online games.
4. The Education Gap at the Bottom
If you went to an elite private school or public school in a wealthy neighborhood, you
got an education that reinforced innovation and creativity, while the worst public high
schools focused on just getting the kids through with the bread-and-butter basics.
5. The Funding Gap
Federal funding for research in physical and mathematical sciences and engineering, as
a share of GDP, actually declined, and the effects are starting to show, as other nations
surpass the US in scientific research and innovations.
6. The Infrastructure Gap
In the first three years of the Bush Administration, the United States dropped from 4th to
13th place in the global rankings of broadband Internet usage [and] most U.S. homes can
access only basic broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in
the developed world. Even worse is the USs standing in the mobile market.

What the US Should Do

These are the five actions the US should take to remain competitive in the flat world.
1. Leadership

This is where we need politicians who are able and willing to help educate and
explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to
thrive in it. Summoning all our [nation's] strengths and skills to produce a twenty-firstcentury renewable energy source is George W. Bushs opportunity to be both Nison
going to China and JFK going to the moon in one move.
2. Muscles
This is where the government and companies can guarantee you that [they] will
concentrate on giving you the tools to make yourself more lifetime employablemore
able to acquire the knowledge or the experience needed to be a good adapter, synthesizer,
collaborator, etc.
3. Cushioning
This is the concept of wage insurance that would compensate you for your old specific
skills, for a set period of time, while you take a new job and learn new specific skills.
4. Social Activism
This is where global corporations must develop moral consciences because they are
going to command more power, not only to create value but also to transmit values, than
any transnational institutions on the planet.
5. Parenting
This is where we need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love:
There comes a time when youve got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television,
shut off the iPod, and get your kids down to work.

What Developing Countries Should Do

These are the actions a developing country should take to remain competitive in the flat world.
1. Introspection
This is where a country asks itself to what extent is my country advancing or being left
behind by the flattening of the world, and to what extent is it adapting to and taking
advantage of all the new platforms for collaboration and competition?
2. Reform Wholesale
This is where a country [focuses] on improving education and infrastructure and, in
particular, adopting better governance [and] market-friendly macroeconomic policies [on
a strategic, high level].

3. Reform Retail
This is where a country [looks] at infrastructure, education, and governance and
[upgrades] each one [on a tactical, detailed level], so more of your people have the tools
and legal framework to innovate and collaborate at the highest levels.
4. Culture and Glocalization
This is where a country asks itself how outward your culture is: To what degree is it
open to foreign influence and ideas? How well does it glocalize [(adopt foreign
ideas)]? as well as how inward your culture is: To what degree is there a sense of
national solidarity and a focus on development, to what degree is there trust within the
society for strangers to collaborate together, and to what degree are the elites in the
country concerned with the masses and ready to invest at home?
5. The Intangible Things
This is where a society increases its ability and willingness to pull together and sacrifice
for the sake of economic development as well as has leaders with the vision to see what
needs to be done in terms of development and the willingness to use power to push for
change rather than to enrich themselves and preserve the status quo.

How Companies Cope

These are ways companies can remain competitive in the flat world.
1. Be Unique
This is where companies [dig] inside themselves to locate [their] real core competency
to avoid commoditization, which is happening faster and faster across a whole range of
industries in the flat world.
2. And The Small Shall Act Big
This is where companies [take] advantage of several new forms of collaboration
supply-chaining, outsourcing, insourcing, and all the steriodsto make [their small
companies] very big.
3. And The Big Shall Act Small
This is where companies create a platform that allows individual customers to serve
themselves in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time, according to their own
tastes.
4. Be Collaborative

This is where companies take advantage of the triple convergence to collaborate with
the smartest, most efficient people you can find anywhere in the world.
5. Get Regular X-rays
This is where companies constantly identify and strengthen their niches and outsource
the stuff that is not very differentiating.
6. Outsource to Win
This is where companies [outsource] to acquire knowledge talent to grow their business
faster, not simply to cut costs and cut back.
7. Be Socially Responsible
This is where companies pioneer socially responsible outsourcing [where it's not just
about] saving money they can invest somewhere else, [it's about] creating better lives for
some of the poor citizens of the world.

The Unflat World

These are the issues holding the world back from becoming truly flat.
1. Too Sick
These are people who are too sick whose lives are stalked everyday by HIV-AIDS,
malaria, TB, and polio, and who do not even enjoy steady electricity or potable water.
2. Too Disempowered
These are people who dont have the tools or the skills or the infrastructure to participate
in any meaningful or sustained way with the flat world.
3. Too Frustrated
These are people who are threatened, frustrated, and even humiliated by this close
contact [with the flat world], which, among other things, makes it very easy for people to
see where they stand in the world vis-a-vis everyone else.
4. Too Many Toyotas
This is where the flattening of the world will set off a global struggle for natural
resources and junk up, heat up, garbage up, smoke up, and devour up our little planet
faster than at any time in the history of the world.

The Globalization of the Local

This is the phenomenon that allows diaspora communities around the world to use todays
global media networks to cling to their local mores, news, traditions, and friendsno matter
where they are living. It is not the global which comes and envelops us. It is the local which
goes global.

The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention

This is the theory that no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like
Dells, will ever fight a war against each other as long as both are part of the same global supply
chain.
Source : http://bizthoughts.mikelee.org/book-summary-the-world-is-flat.html