TVO ILC
BOH4M Unit 1
Excerpts from: The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Excerpts from: The World
is Flat. A Brief History of
the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Friedman
In the back of that van, I scribbled down four
words in my notebook: “The world is flat.”
(…) The global competitive playing field
was being leveled. The world was being
flattened. (pp. 7-8)
[Friedman explains the flattening of the
marketplace by ten major events, which he
calls flatteners.]
Flattener # 1. 11/9/89. The fall of the Berlin
Wall didn’t just help flatten the alternatives to
free-market capitalism and unlock enormous
pent-up energies for hundreds of millions of
people in places like India, Brazil, China, and
the former Soviet Empire. It also allowed us
to think about the world differently–to see
it as more of a seamless whole. (…) While
the positive effects of the wall coming down
were immediately apparent, the cause of the
wall’s fall was not so clear. (…) But if I had to
point to one factor as first among equals, it
was the information revolution that began in
the early- to mid-1980s. (pp. 51, 52)
Flattener # 2. 8/9/95. The first mainstream
browser–and the whole culture of Web
browsing for the general public–was created
by a tiny start-up company in Mountain
View, California, called Netscape. Netscape
became public on August 9, 1995, and the
world has not been the same since. (…)
In short, the PC-Windows phase begat
the Netscape browsing e-mail phase and
the two together enabled more people to
communicate and interact with more other
people anywhere on the planet than ever
before. (pp. 56, 71)
Copyright © 2018 The Ontario Educational Communications Authority. All rights reserved.
Flattener # 3. Work Flow Software. In the
late 1990s, the software industry began
to respond to what its consumers wanted.
Technology companies, through much
backroom wrangling and trial and error,
started to forge more common Web-based
standards, more integrated digital plumbing
and protocols, so that anyone could fit his
hose–his software applications–onto anyone
else’s hydrant. (pp. 75)
Flattener # 4. Open-Sourcing. Open-source
is an important flattener because it makes
available for free many tools, from software to
encyclopedias, that millions of people around
the world would have had to buy in order
to use, and because open-source network
associations–with their open borders and
come-one-come-all approach–can challenge
hierarchical structures with a horizontal model
of innovation that is clearly working in a
growing number of areas. (pp. 102-103)
Flattener # 5. Outsourcing. Companies
found that they could go to MIT and find four
incredibly smart Chinese engineers who
were ready to work for them from there for
the same amount that it would cost them to
hire one engineer in America. (pp. 113)
Flattener # 6. Offshoring. On December 11,
2001, China formally joined the World Trade
Organization, which meant Beijing agreed
to follow the same global rules governing
imports, exports, and foreign investments that
most countries in the world were following.
(…) Here we get to real flattening aspect
of China’s opening to the world market.
The more attractive China makes itself as
a base of offshoring, the more attractive
other developed and developing countries
competing with it, like Malaysia, Thailand,
Ireland, Mexico, Brazil and Vietnam, have to
make themselves. (pp. 114, 117)
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TVO ILC
Excerpts from: The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Flattener # 7. Supply-Chaining. Wal-Mart’s
ability to bring off this symphony on a
global scale–moving 2.3 billion general
merchandise cartons a year down its
supply chain into its stores–has made it the
most important example of the next great
flattener I want to discuss, which is supply
chaining. Supply-chaining is a method of
collaborating horizontally–among suppliers,
retailers, and customers–to create value.
(…) Wal-Mart became the biggest retailer in
the world because it drove a hard bargain
with everyone it came in contact with. But
make no mistake about one thing: Wal-Mart
also became number one because this little
hick company from northwest Arkansas
was smarter and faster about adopting new
technology than any of its competitors. (pp.
129, 131)
Flattener # 8. Insourcing. “It’s a process
that has come to be called “insourcing–a
whole new form of collaboration and creating
value horizontally, made possible by the
flat world and flattening it even more. (…).
Insourcing came about because once the
world went flat, the small could act big. (…)
This created a whole new global business
opportunity for traditional package delivery
firms like UPS. (…) In many cases today,
UPS and its employees are so deep inside
their clients’ infrastructure that it is almost
impossible to determine where one stops
and the other starts. The UPS people are
not just synchronizing your packages–they
are synchronizing your whole company
and its interaction with both customers and
suppliers. (pp. 143, 150)
Copyright © 2018 The Ontario Educational Communications Authority. All rights reserved.
BOH4M Unit 1
Flattener # 9. In-forming. In-forming is
the individual’s persona analog to open-
sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-
chaining, and offshoring. In-forming is the
ability to build and deploy your own personal
supply chain–a supply chain of information,
knowledge, and entertainment. (…) In-
forming, though, also involves searching
for friends, allies and collaborators. It
is empowering the formation of global
communities, across all international and
cultural boundaries, which is another
critically important flattening function. (pp.
153,157).
Flattener # 10. The Steroids. Digital, Mobile,
Personal and Virtual. Engines talking to
computers, talking to people, talking back
to the engines, followed by people talking
to people–all done from anywhere to
anywhere. That is what happens when all
the flatteners start to get turbocharged by all
the steroids. (pp. 172)
Source: Friedman, T. L. (2005). The World
Is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-first
Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
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