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Full Text of Speech
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Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and renowned journalist, Thomas L
Friedman recently was recently at the Indian School of Business to
speak to the ISB Community.
Most famous as the ‘world is flat’ man, Friedman has authored, The
World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century,- an account of
the great changes taking place in the technology and communications
aided world today, which has flattened the globe, and the challenge
seems to be to keep pace and stay put in this flat world.
“The World is Flat, I must confess, came completely out of
accident,” he said to the audience at a packed auditorium inside the
ISB. He shared that as a New York Times foreign affairs columnist,
his column really oscillated between Lexus issues, issues of
globalisation, finance, technology, and Olive Tree issues (issues of
ethnic conflict, traditional nationals, etc). It was only after
9/11, that Friedman spent the next three years trying to understand
the root of the catastrophe, and that led to his next documentary
film on the theme ‘why does everyone hate America’?
“I had this crazy idea that we should go out to call-centres all
over the world, and interview young people who spend their days
imitating Americans. This was the time when the issue of outsourcing
had just exploded on to the world stage. So I landed at Bangalore
and shot a documentary called the ‘Other side of Outsourcing - to
look at this phenomenon from the ground up,“ he recalled his route
towards authoring this book, which went on to win the inaugural
Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award, among
other acclaims.
An interaction with Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani, who mentioned to
Friedman that the global economic playing field is getting levelled
and that Americans are not ready, kind of crystallised his thoughts
that actually the global economic playing field was getting
flattened. “It popped into my head that Nilekani, one of India’s
premier engineer entrepreneurs, was telling me that the world is
flat, and I wrote that down in my note pad – ‘The world is flat’,”
he shared about the seed and spur of his book’s idea.
According to Friedman globalisation can be divided into three great
eras. “Globalisation one - from 1492 up till the early 1800s. This
era was really spearheaded by countries who went global through your
country. The dynamic agent of globalisation was the state. It was
Spain exploring the Americas, Britain colonising India, etc.
Globalisation 2 was the period from early 1800s to the year 2000. It
shrunk the world from size medium to size small, spearheaded by
companies across the world. And while you were sleeping we entered
globalisation 3.0 from the year 2000 to the present. The world is
shrinking from size small to size tiny and flattening the global
economic playing field at the same time,” he said.
Friedman added, “It is really exciting, terrifying, and wholly
unprecedented, that this era of globalisation is built around
individuals who can now compete, connect, and collaborate. Farther,
faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before.”
Friedman’s list of “flatteners” includes the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the rise of Netscape, the dotcom boom, the rise of
outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining, and insourcing. 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.
His gripping talk next focussed on the key “flatteners” that have
resulted in this flat world platform. “The first was the personal
computer. With the PC, individuals could suddenly author their own
content, words, photos, spreadsheets, videos in digital form, etc.
And once your content can be shaped, manipulated and authored in
digital form, it meant that it could be sent to so many more places
and distributed in so many ways. That was kind of the first
flattener,” Friedman noted.
The second flattener, he said, was a small start up company in
Mountain View California called Netscape. “Netscape’s product, a
simple point and click device that brought the internet to life,
made it this incredible tool of connectivity that grandma and
grandpa, grandson and granddaughter could use with equal facility,”
he said. He also recalled that when Netscape went public, it
triggered the dotcom boom and the dotcom bubble.
The third flattener was, according to Friedman, a “quiet
revolution”. It was a revolution in transmission protocols - a
collection of protocols that made everyone’s computers and
software’s interoperable. Friedman said, “Suddenly more people could
compete, connect and collaborate with more other people for less
money. When I say the world is flat I don’t mean we are equal, it
means that we have created a flat platform, on which more people can
enter everyday and share knowledge, work, entertainment,
information, business, and unfortunately also terrorism. “
His belief, he shared, was that we are moving from a value creation
model of commanding and control to a value creation model of connect
and collaborate, from a vertical value creation to horizontal value
creation. “It is going to be seen as the mother of all inflection
points. It’s going to be as big as Guttenberg’s invention of the
printing press," he voiced his optimism.
He also shared some thoughts that he has penned in his third point
edition of the book. “The greatest competition going forward in this
flat world is not going to be between countries but between
companies and going forward, between individual imagination. And
therefore the countries that unleash, tap, nurture, empower, and
enable individual imagination, are the ones that I am looking for to
win in the 21st century.”
Friedman concluded the evening’s talk with another enlightening
theory that though the world is witnessing the IT surge, what is yet
to come is the Energy Technology (ET) revolution.“The world will
truly become flat when IT meets ET. But for that to happen, we need
to have a real revolution, a green revolution, and not just a green
party.”
Contributions are invited for the December 2007 issue of Alma Matters. Please send in information on any events that have taken place or are being planned in your chapter as well as personal milestones that you would like to share with the ISB alumni community to
Smita_Hopper@isb.edu |
