The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

What’s this about?

Thomas L. Friedman originally captured my attention on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He talked briefly about the book and what it covered: How the world is becoming flat through the sharing of information. He proposes that there are many “flattener’s” that make sharing information easier. Ten to be exact:

1. The Berlin wall comes down
2. Netscape goes public
3. Work flow software
4. Open sourcing
5. Outsourcing
6. Offshoring
7. Supply-chaining
8. Insourcing
9. In-forming
10. Digital, mobile, personal and virtual or “The Steroids”

Friedman goes into detailed examples of how each of these affected the flattening of the world. He also doesn’t hold back in using the catch phrase “flattening” over and over in all his examples. It’s like a one sided conversation with someone who’s trying to get you to adopt their cool phrase.  Except instead of enticing you to use it, it only annoys you. In respect to individuals who will be reading this, I’ll make an effort to use the “flattening” terms as little as possible throughout this review.

Is the book only about those ten factors and how they increase the sharing of information?  No, however they do define the platform for which Friedman launches his chronological journey through the globalization of the world. He defines how they converge on each other and act as a singular flattening force on our world. Through short stories of companies, societies, human interaction, and all of them entertaining, Friedman explains the importance of globalization and why it’s a force to be respected.

I think there are some very common misconceptions about this book that should be cleared up immediately.  This book does not go into great detail about any one “flattener” and instead hits upon everything generically.  This definitely keeps the reader engaged as you’re never really challenged by any of Friedman’s ideas.  More to the point it’s like having your eyes opened to an obvious fact that you didn’t see before: Globalization.

Why Should I Care?

In all honesty the book is written very well. It’s an all encompassing look into the history of globalization. The examples are entertaining and engaging. If you haven’t had any experience with them in the past this is a great introduction.  But as I said before it’s pretty generalized for the sake of entertainment and sensationalism.  The entire theme can be summed up with the fact that the internet came into existence and became popular and flattened the world.  All the other factors play off this root concept of which for whatever reason Friedman doesn’t look at in great detail but instead brushes over with many examples.  Google is a great example that he applies quite often throughout the book.  Friedman explains that a flattener is much like Google in that when we didn’t have it, we didn’t much care.  However, once Google came into our lives, we have a hard time living without it.  We rely on it in many ways to make our lives easier and to communicate with the rest of the world.  It’s that type of simple example that is repeated throughout the book to open the readers’ eyes to globalization.

Opening peoples eyes to globalization doesn’t sound like it’s that important at first.  But that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  China and India are discussed in many examples throughout The World is Flat.  Each is discussed in context to their strengths: India and their outsourcing and offshoring capabilities and China about their labor force.  Realizing the potential of these two countries alone and their effect on the United States economy is really the benefit of this book.

Are There Any Weaknesses?

I’ve read a few reviews of this book in curiosity of what other people thought.  Oddly enough the main thing everyone else complained about was also my number one complaint.  The constant beating of the “World is Flat” drum throughout the whole book.  I found myself having to put the book down at times because I was just so annoyed with the constant use of “flat”, “flattener”, “flattened”, “flattening”, etc. when there are so many other words that would have made the point so much clearer.  It gets to the point where you feel as if you’re being programmed to use this word and you really don’t even know what it means anymore since Friedman uses it to describe everything and define nothing.  But let’s move on and look at the content itself.

The analysis of globalization in this book is very general.  It doesn’t go into a lot of detail on any of the issues presented.  There’s a book written in response
that critically analyzes Friedman’s book and the main points he makes:

The World Is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman

I haven’t read this book yet, although I plan to pick it up and take a look at what issues Aronica and Ramdoo present.  I’m guessing it’s a lot clearer than Friedman’s approach.  The fact that there’s an entire book written in response to Friedman’s should tell you something.

Further Thoughts

While reading this book I found that I was inspired to look further and take notice of a lot more issues that could be affecting the globalization of the world around me.  While I had to really ignore the constant use of the word “flat” and its many incarnations, I think it did play a crucial role in framing the content of the book around its title.  That connection between the drastic claims of a flat world and the stories that paint the picture make the reader open their eyes to what’s happening around them.  The world is getting smaller.  Communication is increasing in speed.  Information is becoming as available as air.  Every new generation has more and more opportunities than the one previous.  We just have to go grab it.

That pressure to get out of the chair and go do something I think is the greatest take away from this book.  We need to understand that America is still great and has a lot of things to offer.  The most important thing: our imaginations.