{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16th year. During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis. We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations). These posts will focus only on books I have presented. My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings. I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward. The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #4 of 30
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Synopsis presented December, 1999
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999).
{Note: I thought about writing this 4th post in this series, my 2nd selection from 1999, about Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicone Valley (Random House, 1999), which I presented in October, 1999. But I didn’t. From the book:
“I didn’t want to ask David Filo what it’s like to have a billion dollars. I just wanted to ask him if he still slept under his desk.”
(David Filo was cofounder of Yahoo)
and
I thought about writing this 4th post about Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (Paulist Press, 1977), which I presented in June, 1999. But I did not choose this book either. From the book:
The servant leader is servant first. “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first.” The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.}
Instead, I chose to write my 4th post, the second for the year 1999, on The Lexus and the Olive Tree.
Let me start with this. This is the synopsis that made Jim Young (a long time participant and fan of the First Friday Book Synopsis) mad at me. He walked up to me later and said that I had “forced” him to buy 25 copies of this book to give away to key people in his circle after he heard my synopsis. (This, by the way, explains why our First Friday Book Synopsis might be a good event for authors of books. Though we present a comprehensive synopsis of each book, it is always also an “appetite whetter,” and folks buy the books they hear us present rather regularly).
This was my first exposure to a “big picture” look at that new concept/reality called “globalization.” Needless to say, globalization keeps rolling along.
The most famous line from the book was this one: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s”, which Mr. Friedman “clarified and updated” later.
I am sad to report that my handout for this synopsis is one that was lost during one of my computer failures. So, what I remember more is impression than details included in my comprehensive handout would remind me of. But, I found some helpful information from a review in Salon, by Scott Whitney, which helps:
By “globalization” Friedman means the cluster of trends and technologies — the Internet, fiber optics, digitalization, satellite communications — that have increased productivity and cranked up the speed of international business since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. During this period, the declining cost of communications has led to the “democratization” of finance, information and technology. If your company has replaced the switchboard operator with an automated phone menu, if you have ever received a FedEx package or sent an e-mail, you have felt the effects of globalization.
There is hardly a page in the book without an underlineable passage. (For example: “In the Cold War, the most frequently asked question was: ‘How big is your missile?’ In globalization, the most frequently asked question is: ‘How fast is your modem?’”)
In his foreword to the 2000 edition, Mr. Friedman wrote this:
What has not changed is the core thesis of this book: that globalization is not simply a trend or a fad, but is, rather, an international system. It is the system that has now replaced the old Cold War system…
and
This new world order is evolving so fast that sometimes I wish this were an electronic book that I could just update every day.
He wrote this new foreword in 2000, well before the Kindle and its successor competitors (the Kindle made its debut in 2007). And, of course, Mr. Friedman continued to update his thinking, through his columns, and the blockbuster best-seller The World is Flat, which was published in April, 2005, and I presented just two months later in June, 2005.
In the first edition of this book, he had a chapter titled “Buy Taiwan, Hold Italy, Sell France.” And, in “Opening Scene: The World is Ten Years Old,” he includes this description of the book’s purpose:
“What I have tried to write is a guidebook for how to follow that drama (the drama of the unfolding realities of globalization) and how to think about managing it.”
I’m not sure we fully grasp, even now, just how deeply globalization has changed and shaped our lives. Nor do I think we have much chance of actually “managing” globalization. But this book introduced me, and some of the participants at the First Friday Book Synopsis, to the big picture of globalization. Thomas Friedman was right at the beginning of the curve of this incredibly important understanding.
First Friday Book Synopsis 