a flat world

While Columbus sailed the ocean blue in hopes of finding a new route to India, he discovered America and proved that the world was round. When Thomas Friedman flew to Bangalore, India he encountered Infosys’ global conferencing center – ground zero of the Indian outsourcing industry and it led him on a road to realizing that the world was flat.
While outsourcing is one dimension of a flatter world, according to Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys Technology Limited, over the last few years there has been a massive investment in broadband cables, computers have gotten cheaper and new technology has developed so since 2000 “a platform has been created where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere.”
So there are a growing amount of jobs are being outsourced to India and China. For example, there are currently 245,000 Indians working in call centers in Bangalore, answering phones calls from all around the world or dialing out to solicit people for credit cards or collect overdue bills. They are practicing English in a variety of accents, from the Queens English to Midwest American. The types of jobs being shipped overseas vary from accountant work to looking at CAT scans, to working for Reuters News service, because the labor is much cheaper.
Even Tokyo is outsourcing jobs to Dalian, China the silicon valley of China, about an hours flight northeast of Beijing. The Mayor of Dalian told Friedman over a traditional ten course Chinese dinner “We have twenty-two universities and colleges with over two hundred thousand students in Dalian” where more than half of those students graduate with engineering or science degrees, learning Japanese and English.
Mayor Xai says, “The rule of the market economy is that if somewhere has the richest human resources and the cheapest labor, of course the enterprise and the business will naturally go there. Chinese people first were the employees and working for the big foreign manufactures, and after several years, after we have learned all the processes and steps, we can start our own firms. Software will go down the same road… First we will have our young people employed by the foreigners, and then we will start our own companies.”
Not only is outsourcing for lower costs happening, but there is also “homesourcing”, where new companies like JetBlue are employing at home moms and grandmothers to make reservations for flights.
Friedman describes the flattening of the world in this way:
GLOBALIZATION 1.0From the time Columbus said 1492 to 1800 was Globalization 1.0 where the world went from large to medium sized. Globalization 1.0 was about countries and muscle. Whichever country had the horsepower, wind power and later steam power they moved ahead economically.
GLOBALIZATION 2.0The second great era was Globalization 2.0 between 1800 and 2000 where the world moved from medium sized to small. The key agents of change during this time were the multi-national corporations. It was during this era we saw the birth and development of a global economy.
GLOBALIZATION 3.0What Friedman will argue in this book is that we are now in the Globalization 3.0 era where the dynamic force is not countries or multi-nationals, but the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally.
According to Friedman, the world is not only flattening in the sense of empowering individuals, but more and more the individuals will be people from the East instead of America and Europe. The changes that are happening in our world are seismic and taking place at rapid speed, which is why one of the best ways to describe it is that our round world has become flat – we live in a different world.