Ten forces that flatten the world

Last days I’ve been busy reading Thomas L. Friedman book “The world is flat” (does it sound familiar? ;D). There are some things I like from it, and I would like to share with you what he calls: “the ten forces that flatten the world”

1- 11/9/89: The falling of Berlin wall started to create the idea of worldwide market, opening opportunities to countries such India, Brazil or China

2- 8/9/95:The day Netscape went public. As he says: “Unless you knew how manually drive around the Internet to find things, it was not all exciting”, according to his opinion it changed thanks to Netscape. I agree with it but also think that Yahoo! had to be considered as a milestone. A powerful idea is that .com burst let a great worldwide network of fiber optics that open the path for Outsourcing thanks to cheap-to-free communications

3- Work Flow Software: That’s a part I really like, talks about the adoption of Process Management, and how to break in peaces this process and spread it in excellence centres. Thanks to adoption of software and protocols standards, is easy to world worldwide, and small business can take advantage of it with software platforms such as salesforce.com

4- Uploading: The way Internet process of uploading is “giving the voice to people” based on phenomenons as blogging, wikipedia and so

5- Outsourcing:How India and China have became key players offering engineers to the world using cheap cable communications. I like the theory in which he argues that thanks to Y2K where a lot of engineers were needed to fix lots of computers worldwide, India started to became a player.

6- Offshoring: As outsourcing grows, the phenomenon of fully outsource a department has started. I like the way he explains the global tension that it created:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.”

7- Supply-Chaining:Uses Wall-Mart as examples how effective supply chains have become for a “global optimization” and how technologies such as RFID will change the way some things are now done and thought.

8- Insourcing: How companies are using their excellence as basis for magnifying their portfolio, uses UPS as example.

9- In-forming:As I wrote in my first post and second, how Internet has become a great information power, where more and more things are visible thanks to search engines. I think this idea is worth a science fiction book! 😀

10- The Steroids: How personal devices are boosting the use of IT. Here I would like to add the link of this article from MIT about how BlackBerry is impacting on the way managers work

I strongly recommend to read this book, specially the part I’ve talked about, it gives a good point of view in state-of-art of the multinationals culture of globalisation and horizontalyzing processes.