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COPYRIGHT 2005 Bell Globemedia InteractiveByline: DAVID TICOLL
The World is Flat:
A Brief History
of the Twenty-first Century
By Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
473 pages, $30.50
The title says it all. "Flat" is a brilliant, instantly clarifying metaphor for the latest, arguably the most profound conceptual megashift to rock the world in living memory.
Thomas Friedman, a New York Times foreign affairs columnist, says the world has gone from round to flat -- and not just because of China and India. Rather, a new "global, Web-enabled playing field allows for multiple forms of collaboration -- the sharing of knowledge and work -- in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or in the near future, even language." The cause, he argues, is a disruptive technology wave comparable to Gutenberg's introduction of the printing press. Only this time it's happening at warp speed and affecting people everywhere all at once. Result: As new winners replace the old and unexpected changes appear in rapid-fire waves, the risks of social disruption are unusually high.
The World is Flat performs three tasks. First, it presents a description of and argument for the flat-world idea. Second, it describes the implications, good and bad, for developing countries, firms, geopolitics and, especially, the United States. Third, it pitches a course of action -- kind of a "flatist manifesto" -- to the book's U.S. readers.
The description and argument go like this: Ten big forces have "flattened the world." One, the fall of the Berlin wall, was a political event. Four were technological: the Web, work-flow software tools (that chunk up complex business activities into discrete, tradable modules), search engines like Google (that empower every individual with information) and "steroids" (networks that connect the world and tools that make everything go really fast).
The remaining forces are changes in the ways we do business. With "open sourcing," self-organizing collaborative communities create viable products (like Linux, a computer operating system), campaigns (like the weblog swarm of Dan Rather's career) and various other things. With outsourcing and offshoring, companies chunk up work into modules that they distribute all over the place. Some work stays in pricey places such as the United States. But more and more, it migrates to low-cost locations: India, China, Eastern Europe. Friedman rightly emphasizes that this global liquidity increasingly affects top professional and management jobs.
On the new playing field, the rules change. Bosses' traditional command-and-control hierarchical ways must open up to a new, horizontal "connect and collaborate" style. Collaboration doesn't banish authority, but it does flip assumptions about how things get done. Another new rule: Powerful people in India and China (for two) harbour clear-eyed plans to flip our assumptions about who sets the world's economic and technology agenda.
All this will lead to a "great sorting out." Capitalism, finally ascendant nearly everywhere, will homogenize life and competition globally just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, of all people, predicted in The Communist Manifesto way back in 1848. Friedman cites it at length.
Once things sort themselves out, will the United States be a winner or a loser? After reviewing the debate on the merits of free trade, Friedman comes up on the win side -- at first. The flattening of the world is largely (though not entirely) unstoppable. Because it increases global growth and demand for products, services and smart people, flatism can be good for the United States. To win, the United States must nurture a work force capable of scaling the global labour- market food chain. Americans need to acquire special talents, specialized in-demand skills or the ability to adapt repeatedly to ever-higher-value-added jobs.
Problem one: The opposite is happening. U.S. university enrolments in science and mathematics are plunging, while demand for these professionals grows 5 per cent a year. For instance, nearly 40 per cent of NASA employees are 50 or over, while only 4 per cent are under 30. The space agency can't find young U.S. citizens (a security requirement) with the skills it needs. The portion of U.S. graduates in engineering these days is 5 per cent, versus 25 per cent in Russia and 46 per cent in China. Meanwhile the Bush administration is cutting, rather than hiking, budgets for scientific research.
Problem two: Offshore workers are not only cheap and well educated, they also typically work harder and do a better job than those they replace -- partly because they are more motivated. Friedman's explanation is a "coefficient of flatness" theory: Flatter countries -- those with few natural resources -- will excel in a flat world. The flat, like Taiwan, Japan and coastal China, tap the creativity and entrepreneurship of their people better than the resource-rich fat, like the United States and Canada. Tar sands, anyone?
Friedman's call to action begins with a demand for leadership at the highest levels -- akin to John F. Kennedy's national campaign to put a man on the moon. But he despairs of such action from today's U.S. government.
The World is Flat is well written, a fast read and covers all the bases, especially when compared with the author's earlier bestseller on globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book is longer than necessary; many of the stories are oft-told business press tales. Occasionally, Friedman hyperventilates. His sections on the changes in business are unnecessarily repetitive and redundant; they also broadcast wrong explanations of some key concepts.
However, this is an important book. Friedman's Revere-like call to action (the Chinese are coming! the Indians are coming!) is almost entirely about opportunities and challenges for the United States. But this is not nationalist myopia. Jolting the United States out of its narcissism and complacency is in the world's best interest. And Canadians should heed Friedman's advice for themselves.
David Ticoll researches and writes about Canada's place in the flat world (which he prefers to call the transparent world). His weblog on this and related topics is http://www.ticoll.typepad.com.
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