Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:
- Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and creating the idea of one world market/community
- The dot-com bubble, with all the over-building of investment and infrastructure that resulted
- Common data languages and computer interoperability standards
- Open source software and community projects
- Outsourcing of work (kickstarted by Y2K)
- Offshoring of production (especially China)
- Supply-chaining – the science of coordination
- In-sourcing (hiring companies to perform traditionally internal company processes)
- In-forming (more and better data freely available for all
- “The steroids:” computing technology that is digital, mobile, personal, and virtual
The triple convergence:
- global, web-enabled collaboration: sharing of knowledge and work
- business process reorganization to take advantage of technologies: flattening of hierarchies, consolidating like functions, virtual companies, etc.
- China, India, and Russia joining the world markets at about the same time
On political and economic systems:
“Communism was a great system for making people equally poor. In fact, there was no better system for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”
On China:
“China has more than 160 cities with a population of 1 million or more.”
“China is a threat, China is a customer, and China is an opportunity. You have to internalize China to succeed. You cannot ignore it.”
On international job competition:
“When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you [kids] is: ‘Finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs.”
On change:
“No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive.”
On staying competitive in the global job market:
“Average Joe has to become special, specialized, or adaptable Joe.”
On being in trouble:
“One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries … when memories exceed dreams, the end is near.”