The World Is Flat

Hardly i can find a time to read a book with the packed schedule in university.Anyway i had a good time reading this book--The World is Flat, while i spent my summer vacation back in Malaysia.



What is globalization? What should we do in order to suit ourselves to this changes?
National Bestseller--"The World Is Flat" by Thomas L.Friedman,New York Times columnist offers us insights on how the world become flat, how should we cope with the flat world, how we take advantage of it and survive from the flat world.






The book offers 10 forces that flattend the world

1.The fall of the Berlin wall on 11/9/89 which tipped the balance of the world and capitalism is the winner between two economic system-capitalism and communism.Since then free market capitalism is the key to economic success even for communist country like China.

About the same period, the invention of IBM PCs and windows operating system had greatly enhanced personal information gathering and personal empowerment.Internet and e-mail created the basic platform that started the global information revolution.

2.8/9/95 When Netscape Went Public--The first web browser which could retrieve documents or web pages stored on internet and display them on any computer screen.The browser had make the internet accessible to everyone, making the computer and its connectivity inherently more useful for millions of people.

3.Work flow software--which enabled digital data to be exchanged between diverse software programs so that they could be shaped, designed, manipulated, edited, reedited, stored, published, and transported without any regard to where people are phisically sitting or which computing devices they are connecting through. This created the virtual environment where task can be distributed to the best guys all around the world and reassembling all the pieces back together.

4.Open-sourcing, Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities--it involves thousands of people around the world to collaborate in writing their own software.Open source software is shared, consistantly improved by its users, and made available for free to anyone.

5.Outsourcing
taking some specific, but limited function that your company was doing in-house-such as research, call center, or accounts receivable- and having another company perform that exact same function for you and then reintegrating their work back into your overall operation.
Example:
General Electric:India is a developing country with a developed intellectual capability.We spend a lot of money doing software, couldn't we do some work of our IT deparment here?

HealthScribe India, a company set up in Bangalore to do outsourced medical transcription for American doctor.

Outsourcing from America to India, a new form of collaboration exploded.

6.Offshoring
when a company takes one of its factories that it is in Canton, Ohio, and moves the wholw factory offshore to Conton, China.There it produces the very same product in the very same way, only with cheaper labor, lower taxes, subsidized energy, and lower health-care costs.

7.Supply-Chaining
Supply-chaining is a method of colaborating horizontally-among suppliiers, retailers, and customers-to create value.The more these supply-chain grow and proliferate, the more they force the adoption of common standards between companies, the more they eliminate points of friction at borders, the more the efficiencies of one company get adopted by the others, and the more they encourage blobal collaboration.

8.Insourcing
UPS was not just delivering packages anymore;it was synchronizing global supply chains for companies large and small.
Example:To comeover customer complains about repair process for broken mechines took too long.Toshiba and UPS come up with this solution.Cutting out the middle steps that include picking up machine from customers, bringing to UPS's hub, then flying it to Toshiba repair facility and then fly it back again to UPS's hub and to the customer house, Now UPS will pick the machines and repair it theirselve with certified repairman of Toshiba, then send it back to the customer.
Big company didn't want to manage the complex global supply chain on their own and this give the opportunities for this new form of collaboration.

9.In-Forming--Google, Yahoo!,MSN Web search
in-forming is the individual's personal analog to open-sourcing, out sourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring.in-forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply-chain--a supply chain of information,knowledge,and entertainment.in-forming is about self-collaboration-becoming your own self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor.In-forming is searching for knowledge.It is about seeking like-minded people and communities.

10.The steroids--Digital,mobile personal and virtual
The more people have the ability to push and pull information anywhere to anywhere faster, the more barriers to competition and communication dissapear.Wireless technology making this posible.