thomas l. friedman on the charlie rose show

I just finished watching an awesome Charlie Rose Show where Charlie Rose interviewed Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman brought up some interesting points, some of which are in his book, The World Is Flat. He went over his list of the ten events that "flattened" the world (and these are my thinking notes, so they probably won't make much sense out of context):

1. "11/9" - 9 November 1989 is when the walls came down and the Windows came up. The Berlin Wall falling on 9 November 1989 and Windows 3.1 being released five months later marked the beginning of globalization (at the pace we know it today).

2. 9 October 1995 - Netscape goes public and the dot com boom begins. The Web starts to take off and the investment money starts pouring in. In five years, 11 trillion dollars gets invested in fiber optic infrastructure, which significantly drops the cost of communications then and in the long run. This marks the start of people connecting and communicating with each other faster and cheaper.

3. Applcations start connecting and communicating to each other. This combined with people connecting and communicating with each other starts a new era of collaboration.

4. Collaboration through outsourcing. Organizations realize that sometimes it's better to let someone else do a portion of your work if they are good at it.

5. Collaboration through offshoring. Organizations realize that the someone who is good at it (and cheaper at it) might be overseas. The factory manufacturing goods for Wal-Mart moves from Canton, Ohio to Canton, China. Example: 1500 Russian aerospace engineers are working from Russia for Boeing on the 787 project.

6. Collaboration through open sourcing. Example: A student at Stanford and a developer in New Zealand work together to produce Mozilla Firefox, for free, collaborating over the Internet, and achieving five percent of the browser market share with 10 million downloads.

7. Collaboration through insourcing. Example 1: If someone's Toshiba laptop is broken, Toshiba tells the user to go to their local UPS Store to drop off their laptop. The laptop gets shipped to UPS's facility in Louisville and to the side of the warehouse is a clean room where UPS employees fix the laptop and ship it back to the user when it's done -- all without Toshiba ever getting involved. Example 2: An order is placed thorugh Nike.com and UPS employees at a UPS facility process the order, box it up for shipping, and deliver it straight to the customer's doorstep. Think about this: that person driving the Papa John's pizza delivery truck may well be a UPS employee!

8. Collaboration through supply chaining. Example: A Dell laptop is designed in Taiwan, manufactured in several locations in coastal China, receives parts from Ireland, Israel, and a multitude of other countries in the world and then is shipped to Nashville for final delivery within the US. Dell is really aware of its supply chain and if it knows that there is a problem with the 20 GB hard drive supply, customer service and sales immediately start pushing a promotion where a customer upgrading to a 40 GB hard drive will get a free printer and some extras. Essentially, based on knowledge of its supply chain and where the weak points are, Dell can "shape" its demand through its sales and promotions to circumvent the deficiencies in the chain, transparently providing value to the customer.

9. Collaboration through informing. Google and search engines have enabled people to find the resources (in terms of information and people) they need, anywhere, anytime. Example (this is totally real): Colin Powell needs a copy of a UN Resolution to look over. Instead of calling his aide in to retrieve it, Colin Powell brings up google, and finds a copy of the resolution in an instant. Now the aides realize just showing up with the document isn't good enough anymore, they've got to show up with some extra added value, something to contribute to the information, raising the level of collaboration.

10. Collaboration steroids: Wireless and Voice over IP (VOIP) allows items 4 through 9 above to happen anywhere, anytime, over any device.

Although items 4 through 10 started out as individual phenomena, they are all converging and mixing and matching together as needed to further enhance collaboration and flattening the world. That is, making geographic distance (and to some extent languages) a less important factor in business.

So, the big questions for us here in the US: where are our political leaders and our general public going to get in the loop? Our industry leaders (and some members of the public) know exactly what's going on, but for some reason no one else cares to get it. What are we as a country going to do about it? We've depended on importing brainpower for a while, but with all of the communications technology and the post 9/11 immigration restrictions, we're essentially telling this brainpower to "stay home." So where will we get this new brainpower from? How come so few kids want to become scientists and engineers? When was the last time a kid said she wanted to be an astronaut? Kennedy's goal of landing on the moon inspired a generation of people to become scientists and engineers, but that generation is now retiring, with few people to take their place. When will our leaders challenge today's youth to get involved in science and engineering? What about a call for a goal of energy independence?

Preparing for the future: first, one can never have enough education (specialized and generalized). Second, we have to learn how to collaborate with people from different cultures. You thought communicating with people in the US was hard enough. We're going to have to learn how to work with people who speak different languages, people who have different cultural values, people who have a different way of seeing the world. Who ever thought that jobs today would have titles like: Director of Search Optimization Technologies and Director of East Asian Operations.

One last thought from Friedman that caught my ear: "The moment someone buys a product from Wal-Mart, a new one is being manufactured in China to take its place on the shelf. Along the same lines, the moment a suicide bomber blows himself up in Baghdad, another one is being produced in Riyadh." Really, globalization does involve both the Lexus (chasing materialism and consumerism) and the Olive Tree (holding on to traditions and cultural identity). The problems that the world faces now are directly related to and a part of globalization and we need to face those facts. The Western political leaders unfortunately are trapped in the old foreign affairs mindset of nuclear threats and powers. (Yes, the old world threats are real, but they are sort of missing the boat a little by not acknowledging globalization, both in terms of benefits and drawbacks.)

I'm really looking forward to reading Friedman's new book and checking out the documentary on Thursday night. I think it's going to help clarify my thinking and help me explain it better.. I hope :)