The Ride to Boston:

We left Waterloo this morning at 8:30 and got here, Boston, around 10 pm. It was a long bus ride but it didn’t seem as long. I was actually very productive and got some of my readings done including the first chapter of “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. As I was readying I remembered my undergraduate classes where I first got introduced to Friedman through “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”.
“After 9/11, Friedman says, he paid less attention to globalization. He spent the next three years traveling to the Arab and Muslim world trying to get at the roots of the attack on the US. Friedman later realized that while he was writing about terrorism, he missed an even bigger story: Globalization had gone into Globalization 3.0 which is about shrinking the world from size small to the size tiny. So he wrote The World Is Flat to explain his updated thinking on the subject.
Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.
” Today, “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.” Friedman’s list of “flatteners” includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, and supply chaining. Friedman says these flatteners converged around the year 2000, and “created a flat world: a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language.”

Even though I agree with Friedman but can not stop to think that the facts are a bit exaggerated. Now I don't necessarily agree or disagree with everything that Friedman writes but one thing is hard to refute: his understanding of innovation globally and the impact it is already having on the United States. And the pace will only pick up with time. This is an era that everyone can compete globally and collaborate on each other’s knowledge to innovate. Would politicians allow this? Would china and India be able to play catch up to US and Europe? As far as I understand so far only the non-innovative and routine parts of jobs are being exported to them. In previous versions of globalization manual labour was off-shored and now coding and call centers are exported to those areas. Is coding considered manual labour these days? Who would think!!!
What do you think?

I was telling one of my good friends about this and he sent me his soft copy of the book so now I get to listen to it when I’m driving ;)