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Thomas Friedm The World Is Flat

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Thomas Friedman – The World is Flat
Introduction
“Tom, the playing field is being levelled, and you Americans are not ready for it”
These words by Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys proved to be the basis of the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman.
The video starts with Thomas Friedman, a veteran award winning American journalist, speaking of his visit to Bangalore in India to work on a documentary based on outsourcing, and how his meeting with the then CEO of Infosys influenced him in writing his book where he analyzes globalization and lists out the various factors that led to a “flat” world.
Mr. Friedman then continues and briefly summarizes the first three chapters of his book and how he derived them.
The World is Flat …show more content…

This era witnessed individuals/small groups going global irrespective of the color or race. As a result of this, the size further shrunk from small to tiny and almost flattened the world.
The second chapter of the book is about the 10 “Flatteners” i.e. the 10 forces, events or trends that triggered this change.
Flattener #1- 11/9/89 or The collapse of the Berlin Wall: Mr. Friedman argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall was really the decline of communism and in turn the rise of capitalism. With the advent of the Windows powered computers, people from different parts of the world could connect with each other which made it possible to see the world as a “single flat plate.”
Flatter #2: 98/9/95 Netscape: Friedman believes that this was the essence of people to people connectivity and hence a huge flattener. He says that Netscape going public played a key role in commercializing internet and making it accessible to everyone across the globe.
The other flatteners mentioned are Work flow software, Uploading, Outsourcing, Offshoring, Supply-chaining, Insourcing, Informing and Steroids. He illustrates these concepts with examples and provides a strong explanation to support his argument. In my opinion, his discussion of the UPS, or in his words “the guys in funny brown shorts”, is very strong.
He then moves on to the third chapter of the book, titled “The Triple Convergence”, which talks about the way in which all the ten flatteners

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