Big Breakthroughs Happen When What Is Still

In Friedman’s “It’s a Flat World, After All”, Friedman in a trip Bangalore, India accidentally “encountered the flattening of the world”. The following paper will analyze “It’s a Flat World, After All” and the flattening of the world. To conclude the paper I will summarize my thoughts on the flattening of the world.

These forces are the direct result of advanced technology. Moreover, the forces were made possible thanks to the World Wide Web (which is another force Friedman mentions). Technology and Internet are the real reasons our world became flat, and the reason the above flattener forces evolved. Companies, groups, and individuals – all connected together to form one global village. US companies started to outsource the back rooms of accounting firms and forwarding Dell customers to the 24/7 call center located in India. US companies were able to reduce cost, while making India a “customer service nation” and China a “low labor cost nation”.

Over the past decades, Globalization had made the world a much smaller place. In the passage While I was Sleeping by Thomas L Freidman and The Rise of the Rest by Fareed Zakaria, there is a connection between the two passage. Thomas L. Freidman use the metaphor "the world is flat" which mean there are many competition in the world now. Fareed Zakaria address the U.S power is diminishing because the rest of the world is catching up. Along with the diminishing power, America is also outsourcing jobs to other nations where labor are cheap, and abundant of natural resource are available for use, but it is taking jobs away from many American.

In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley society is highly advanced compared to the era that it was written in. Compared to society today, which is much more advanced in everything besides cloning and the drugs in the novel. The biggest reasoning for them being more advanced is the different moral standards between the book and the real world. Modern society could very possibly have the knowledge to clone and advance our drugs but it isn’t a priority in today’s society. Overall, the biggest advancement today is having technology in general, having been written before computers were invented it’s hard to conceive how far automation could come in 85 years.

Speaker Thomas Friedman is speaking at MIT, which is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He is an American journalist specializing in foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues. “ (Daniel H. Pink) He is talking about the basis on what the book is about and how he understood this new phenomenon. The book is titled “The World Is Flat”. This title is referring to “the global economic playing field being leveled.” This is a tremendous achievement that all started with Christopher Columbus discovering North America in 1492. This was the first development of the globalization of the world, which today has taken over economies all over the world. This advancement of technology has led to “accidently making Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors”. Mr. Friedman then references in chapter one of his book about all of the encounters he had in India that led him to the conclusion, “The World Is Flat”.

1. “But Friedman’s image of a flat earth is profoundly misleading – a view of the world from a seat in business class. Flatness is another way of describing the transnational search by companies for cheap labor, an image that misses the pervasiveness of global inequality and the fact that much of the developing world remains mired in poverty and misery. It also misses the importance of the global geopolitical hierarchy, which guarantees the provision of stability, property rights, and other international public goods. The rise of China and India is less about flatness than it is about dramatic upheavals in the mountains and valleys of the global geopolitical map”

Response: Friedman is referring to several technological advances that have leveled the playing field when it comes to collaboration, and the ease of access of the web. These technological advances have allowed political and social dimensions of society to produce a global society and economy that allows everyone to have an equal pathway to success without regarding geography anymore.

he World Is Flat is Friedman’s explanation of the brave new world facing us. A world that is growing at a rapid pace never seen before in history. Friedman believes that flattening of the world has happened as a result of occurrence of a series of events which he outlines as ten flattening factors. The low-cost computers, dot com bubble, standardized file format, excess laying of optic fibres, outsourcing and offshoring are some of them. This phenomena has the potential to change all of our theories of economies, politics and jobs. It will increase competition and require not only an emphasis on new skills sets, but a much more self-reliant, creative and innovative mind-set.

As an up and coming international management consultant, the idea of the world being flat is an interesting topic. Thomas Friedman, who is one of the leading faces of the “world being flat perspective”, is an extremely well acclaimed author on many topics. Especially on globalization and economic areas. His way of thinking and presentation of the facts are clearly defined and well laid out. This idea of the world being flat explains that the global economic playing field has now been leveled out, and that no one person or group has a distinct advantage over others.

Friedman, T. (2007). While I Was Sleeping. In The World is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-First Century (p. 10). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat he presents his idea of the globalization of the world in all areas; from economic to communication with other countries. Friedman is a journalist from the New York Times and most of his work focuses on economic and technological innovations and advancements, and furthermore how they are associated to history. The ideas he presents in this book are both plausible and convincing. The main focus is whether the world is “flat“. The answer to this question depends on the readers’ political, economical, and technological opinions. Friedman does however present evidence in many situations where the globalization of the world is clearly evident. This essay will explore these different

One of the most important “flattening” events the Friedman described was when the Berlin Wall was taken down. It let people think of the world as a single space. Just after the wall went down, Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system was launched. This helped flatten the world by creating a global computer

Thomas Friedman mentions that world is growing flatter. When he says that world is flat, he means that world is becoming more economically fair and levelling opportunities and wealth among all the nations. With easy access to information and availability of opportunities irrespective of one’s locations is providing for people from many different countries with an equal chance to succeed economically.

The theory of globalization today is a field of intensive debate as the efforts towards defining globalization most often highlight its individual aspects. According to Held and McGrew (1999), “globalisation is an idea whose time has come, yet it lacks precise definition”. Despite the ambiguity of the term “globalisation,” the use of the term, according to Held and McGrew, reflects increased interconnectedness in political, economic and cultural matters across the world creating a shared social space. Given this inter-connectedness, globalisation may be defined as: “a process which embodies a transformation in the spatial organisation of social relations and

‘Globalization: What’s new? What’s not? (And so what)’, portrays the speed in which globalism has increased through many different factors; economically, military, environmentally and socially. This is an idealist analytic approach, not set in stone. This leads on to