{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 #15 of 30
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Synopsis presented June, 2005
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by
Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: April 2005)
Ok, this is becoming almost impossible. I am writing about two books for each year since 1998 – two books for which I have prepared a synopsis, a comprehensive handout, and presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis, our monthly event in Dallas. I present a book every month (as does my colleague Karl Krayer, who presents a different book each month). 12 books a year by me, 12 by Karl. And now in these blog posts, I am trying to write about only two books from each year of the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis. 2005 is impossible! I have 12 good choices. You try to narrow it down to just 2 from a list that includes The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, Winning by Jack Welch, Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner, The Ten Faces of Innovation by Thomas Kelley, A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. And those are the titles that I chose not to write about for my two 2005 days. I truly hate “skipping them.” How can I possibly skip Blink, or A Whole New Mind, or Freakonomics, or…? As I said, this is becoming impossible.
What I did choose is The World is Flat, and my book for tomorrow. (You’ll have to wait for that title). But, please understand, the books I listed that I did not choose (and, a couple of others from 2005 that I left off the list above), are still so very much worth our time and attention. Think about it – when I present only 12 books a year out of the gazillion published each year, I am always narrowing down a list. There are good books I do not choose, and never read; (I suspect there are good books I never even heard of). Others, my colleague presented. There is simply so much to learn, so much to know!
But… for today, let me begin with this. The World is Flat is a big, big book. What I mean is that it was such a “buzz” creator when it came out. It’s not that Friedman said what had not been said. In fact, he had already written much of it himself, in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and in his columns. (A side point: the single most enlightening page I ever read to help me understand the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims was from his earlier book, From Beirut to Jerusalem – page 12, by the way). But, in this book, he looked at a world that is in the midst of true globalization, and came up with a way to describe it that made all of us say “Now I get it.” That is a great gift.
So, what did Mr. Friedman tell us? Let’s start here:
No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The Goldman Sachs building wasn’t done yet, otherwise he could have pointed that out as well and made it a threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasn’t all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabites of Taste!”
No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?
When all of these things (explosion of technology; e-mail, search engines, proprietary software; …) suddenly came together around 2000, they “created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again – and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore is really the culmination of all these things coming together.” (Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys Technologies Limited).
The global competitive playing field was being leveled. The world was being flattened.
He clearly saw the rise of China in this globalized/globalizing world:
If Americans and Europeans want to benefit from the flattening of the world and the interconnecting of all the markets and knowledge centers, they will all have to run at least as fast as the fastest lion – and I suspect that lion will be China, and I suspect that will be pretty darn fast.
And he saw the power that wireless would bring to the equation. The iPhone had not yet hit as he was writing, but he clearly know what was coming:
And now the icing on the cake, the übersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what will allow you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.
In the early days of computing (Globalization 2.0), you worked in the office… Now we are in Globalization 3.0, where, thanks to digitization, miniaturization, virtualization, personalization, and wireless, I can be processing, collecting, or transmitting voice or data from anywhere to anywhere – as an individual or as a machine.
Here is his “summary” of this new world (emphasis added):
It is this triple convergence – of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration – that I believe is the most important force shaping global politics in the early twenty-first century… The next generation of innovations will come from all over Planet Flat.
In my synopses, I always try to summarize each book “in a box,” which I put at the beginning of the second portion of my handout. (I always begin with key excerpts taken directly from the book, then I get to my summary of key content of the book. This “box” comes at the beginning of this second portion). So, here’s what was in my “box” for this book:
The playing field has been leveled. The world is flat. Everyone is your competition. Everyone, everywhere in the world. The only possible path to follow is the path of creative imagination. Or else…
The book describes:
• Three great eras of globalization:
1) From 1492 to about 1800 – Globalization 1.0. It shrank the world from a size large to a size medium. (brawn; horsepower; wind and then steam power) – Countries globalizing
2) From 1800 to about 2000 – Globalization 2.0. It shrank the world from a size medium to a size small. (multinationals) – Companies globalizing
3) From 2000 – Globalization 3.0. It shrank the world from a size small to a size tiny. – Individuals globalizing
And here are some other key points from my handout, beginning with the list that this book is most famous for:
The Ten Forces that Flattened the World
1. 11/9/89 – When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up
2. 8/9/95 – When Netscape went Public
3. Work Flow Software – Let’s do Lunch: Have your application talk to my application
4. Open-Sourcing – Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities (e.g.: Wikipedia)
5. Outsourcing – Y2K
6. Offshoring – Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions
7. Supply Chaining – Eating Sushi in Arkansas (Have you heard of Wal-mart?)
8. Insourcing – What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts are Really Doing
9. In-Forming – Google, Yahoo, MSN Web Search
10. The Steroids – Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual
He describes:
• The triple convergence
• new players
• on a new playing field
• developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration
and
• The new “zippies”
• “a young city or suburban resident, with a zip in his stride. Generation Z. Oozes attitude, ambition, and aspiration. Cool, confident, and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks, and shuns fear.”
And more from the book:
• From Command and Control to Collaborate and Connect
• an ever shrinking gap between America and the rest of the world
• America’s “quiet crisis”
- Dirty little secret number one: the numbers gap
- Dirty little secret number two: the ambition gap
- Dirty little secret number three: the education gap
• Rules for companies:
• Rule #1: When the world goes flat – and you are feeling flattened – reach out for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Don’t try to build walls. (learn the fact that the competition pool is now between big companies, medium companies, and free-lancers – -all competing for the same business).
• Rule #2: And the small shall act big…
• Rule #3: And the big shall act small…
• Rule #4: The best companies are the best collaborators… The next layers of value creation are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone.
• Rule #5: In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest X-rays, and then selling the results to their clients.
• Rule #6: The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink.
• Rule #7: Outsourcing isn’t just for Benedict Arnolds. It’s also for idealists.
I remember reading somewhere recently that World War II “postponed” the arrival of the television into the culture. (numbers: in 1945, there were about 10,000 television sets in the United States. In 1950, about 6 million. In 1960, close to 60 million). In this book, Thomas Friedman wrote (paraphrasing from memory): “we thought globalization had stalled because of 9/11. It did not stall – we just weren’t paying attention for a few years. This book gets us back to what was/is actually happening.”
It’s pretty obvious that this book created no trends, it simply identified what was happening. It helped me make sense of this truly ever-changing globalized/globalizing world. I found it a very valuable, useful book.
First Friday Book Synopsis 
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