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Nature of things to come
The World is Flat: The globalised world in the twenty first century: Thomas L. Friedman; Penguin Books; pp 600. ? 5.99
The world, as no one needs to be told, is a globe. It is not flat. But how come Thomas Friedman believes otherwise? Friedman is totally convinced that he is right. And with sound reasons. Interestingly he made his discovery while in Bangalore.
He says it started in Nandan Nilekani?s conference room at Infosys Technologies Ltd. Friedman wanted to know why the Indians he met were taking work that should originally have been the monopoly of Americans and why Indians had become ?such an important pool for outsourcing of service and information technology work from America and other industrialised countries?.
After his meeting with Nilekani, Friedman found out the answer fast enough. Nilekani told his guest that outsourcing was just one dimension of a ?much more fundamental thing happening? in the world today and that, thanks to technological changes, a platform had been created ?where intellectual work and intellectual capital could be delivered from anywhere?. ?Tom?, said Nilekani, ?the playing field is levelled?. Friedman thought over it and realised that when Nilekani said the playing field had been levelled, what he must have meant was that ?the world is flat?. And that was it. As Friedman saw it, great changes had taken over the world since Columbus first discovered America. The first post-Columbus era lasted from 1492 until around 1800. The second era lasted from 1800 to 2000. During this time the world shrank from a size medium to a size small. Then came the third era when globalisation took place and from a size small the world became ?tiny?, flattening the playing field at the same time.
Till 2000, globalisation was primarily the work of European and American individuals and businesses. Since 2000 this has been taken over by China and India. How this transformation took place is the sum and substance of this remarkable book that says more about India, in many ways, than any other book in recent years. Katherine Mayo who hounded India?s backwardness in the 30?s of the 20th century, were she alive, would have drowned herself. The change that took place in 2000 was part of a known sequence. The US, for example, first made the transition from agriculture to industry, then from industry to services. Presently the world is in the third phase, which is services served globally. Each of the transitions was wrenching in its own way but it was nevertheless accomplished not without pain for plenty of people.
Writes Friedman: ?The transition to the flat world will be particularly wrenching because it is likely to touch many more white-collar workers.? But what is inevitable has to be accepted. But how? What is significant is that the author relies heavily on Indians to provide the answer. Thus, he quotes Rajesh Rao, founder and CEO of Dhruva Interactive, a small game company in Bangalore as saying: ?The Internet now makes this whole world ?like one market place?. This infra-structure is not only going to facilitate sourcing of work to the best price, best quality, from the best place, it is also going to enable a great amount of sharing of practices and knowledge.? Rajesh Rao is further quoted as saying: ?What is really necessary for everybody is to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental shift that is happening in the way people are going to do business? This is the situation you are going to see moving forward?.?.
Western companies and industrial bodies are ?outsourcing? work and that has become a story in itself. Boeing, the US aeronautical company had outsourced design work to Moscow to cut cost by a third. And Russian engineers outsourced the same work to Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore because it was specialising in digitising airplane designs to make them easier to manufacture. In 2003 the US state of Indiana put out a bid to a contract to upgrade the state?s computer systems that process unemployment claims. The contract was won by Tata American International, which is the US-based subsidiary of India?s Tata Consultancy Services.
Tata?s bid of $ 15.2 million came in $ 8.1 million lower than that of its closest rivals, the New York based companies Deloitte Consulting and Accenture Ltd. India won out! And there was no way anybody could stay out of reach from the rest of the world.
When former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell was asked when he realised that the world had gone flat, his answer was in one word: Google. Powell could get whatever information he wanted at one go without having to ask a secretary to go to find it. Thanks to the cell phone and wireless technology, Powell said that no Foreign Minister could hide from him! What Friedman was shocked to learn was that the Indian and the Chinese were racing the US not to the bottom but to the top. An innovative Indian education company, Heymath.com was putting Indian students to work over the Internet, tutoring students in Singapore and elsewhere. In working with public schools in Singapore and even in the US, Heymath was providing teachers with lesson plans, Power Point presentations and other jazzy ways to teach mathematics and science. If anybody made such claims ten year ago, they would have been laughed out of town. Yes, indeed. The world has really become flat.
This is an exciting book, which tells us for the first time what has been quietly happening in the world of technology in just the past one decade. A cultural revolution is in the offing. And it is going to affect everyone, not only technologically, but politically, socially and in every other field. We are living in exciting times?a point that Friedman frequently makes to awaken people to face the future.
This is quite a book and the first of its kind. The revolution that it talks about is going to change man?s thinking and usher in world of peace and prosperity, not dreamt of even by Marx and Lenin, let alone the al Qaidists. It deserves deep study because it describes in vivid and understandable terms, the nature of things to come.
(Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017.)
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