Title: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century
 
Author: Thomas L. Friedman
 
Backstory:
Three-time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman may have already been a foreign-affairs columnist for the New York Times, but it took a trip to India on the Discovery Channel’s dime to inspire his blockbuster bestseller The World Is Flat. Friedman credits executives at Indian companies Infosys and Wipro, as well as their counterparts at American corporations such as I.B.M., Microsoft, and Dell, for “taking him inside the flat world and deciphering it.” 

Total reading time: 640 minutes
 
First published: 2005

Key passages:
“Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in a whisper. 'Honey,' I confided. 'I think the world is flat.'”

“Here I was in Bangalore—more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round—and one of India’s smartest engineers, trained at his country’s top technical institute and backed by the most modern technologies of his day, was essentially telling me the world was flat—as flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain. Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a good thing, as a new milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world—the fact that we had made our world flat!”

“And that is why I argue in this book that around the year 2000 we entered a whole new era: Globalization 3.0. Globalization 3.0 is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0—the thing that gives it its unique character—is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally.”

“One of the unintended consequences of the flat world is that it puts different societies and cultures in much greater direct contact with one another. It connects people to people much faster than people and cultures can often prepare themselves. Some cultures thrive on the sudden opportunities that this global intimacy makes possible. Others are threatened, frustrated, and even humiliated by this close contact, which, among other things, makes it very easy for people to see where they stand in the world vis-à-vis everyone else. All of this helps to explain the emergence of one of the most dangerous and unflattening forces today—the suicide bombers of al Qaeda and the other Islamist terror organizations, who are coming out of the Muslim world and the Muslim communities in Europe.”

“Yes, economic competition in the flat world will be more equal and more intense. We Americans will have to work harder, run faster, and become smarter to make sure we get our share. But let us not underestimate our strengths or the innovation that could explode from the flat world when we really do connect all the knowledge centers together. On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you can have is creative imagination—the ability to be the first on your block to figure out how all these enabling tools can be put together in new and exciting ways to create products, communities, opportunities, and profits.”

Synopsis:
Thomas Friedman has a knack for simplifying things, for taking thick and meaty issues like foreign policy or terrorism and cutting them down to more digestible bites. In The World Is Flat, Friedman tackles no less Herculean a task than laying out the evolution of the global economy and revealing its impact not only on the future of nations and companies but on people’s lives as well. The result is an in-depth history lesson in which Friedman whisks us from Bangalore to China, Russia, and the Middle East to show us, not just tell us, how the world has changed while we’ve slept.

In his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman discussed what he now calls Globalization 2.0, the sudden ability of companies to operate on the same global scale as countries and affect geopolitics in the process. Globalization 3.0, the theme of The World Is Flat, is about how advances in communications and transportation have leveled the playing field for individuals, opening up job pools to just about anyone in the world with an internet connection. A flat world means that people can connect and influence one another in ways and at speeds that were previously unimaginable. “Because it is flattening and shrinking the world, Globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse—non-Western, nonwhite—group of individuals,” Friedman writes. “Individuals from every corner of the flat world are being empowered.”

And even while the headlines of the New York Times, Friedman’s employer, trumpet the downside of globalization—from outsourcing to illegal immigration to terrorism—Friedman says the time for debate has passed. We already live in the flat world, and the people who will not only survive but thrive there will be those who embrace it first. “It is imperative that we be the best global citizens we can be,” he writes. “Because in a flat world, if you don’t visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you.”