The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Book Review: Very disappointing
Summary: 3 Stars
I had heard quite a bit of good about this book and its author, but I was disappointed.
The overall message I tend to agree with, but - boy! - does he flog the idea! The examples are often pertinent and his arguments persuasive (US tax forms completed in India?) but the book suffers from the author's verbosity.
One or two examples would be fine, but any more than that becomes overkill. Arguments tend to be made in five different forms, and if a sixth can be made too, then the author goes for it.
It started well but then got difficult. I reached half-way and called it a day.
A pity - I'd have finished the book had Thomas Friedman or his editor cut out the overkill. A half or less would have been fine.
Book Review: A triumph of rhetoric over reality
Summary: 1 Stars
Undeniably this book has become influential -- it was, for example, the numerous citations in articles by others that persuaded me to buy. Yet not only is it replete with risible factual errors (to give just a very few examples within the space of a mere 17 pages: "Apache ... is a shareware program", p.93; "BitTorrent is a Web site that allows users to upload their own online [sic] music libraries", p.95; "Much like Microsoft Windows, Linux offers a family of operating systems", p.106; "in November 2004, the Mozilla Foundation ... released Firefox", p.110, a browser that I and countless others had been happily using in beta since the Spring) that undermine the reader's confidence in the factual reliability of the tome as a whole, it also reinvents the world with a vocabulary that obfuscates what otherwise would be the fairly uncontentious historical realities of Western colonial and neo-colonial adventures. The creation of terms and labels carries with it the risk that the act of labelling itself constructs, and the public acceptance of the label serves to sustain, the phenomenon it purports to name. Thus Friedman's bizarre and unnecessary invention of three eras that he dubs "Globalization 1.0", "Globalization 2.0", and "Globalization 3.0" obscures the fact that he is in reality talking respectively about a resource economy based on Western exploitation of its colonies for their raw materials, about a manufacturing economy that increasingly saw the export of the manufacturing base to cheap-labour countries of the South, and about -- the present era -- the export of what he terms "grunt work" (p.14) to low-wage workers in poorer countries.
But, as much as anything else, I am intrigued by Freidman's incogitant espousal of what I see to be a fadish trend these days towards decimal versioning of things for which, it seems to me, decimalisation is not only unnecessary in principle but also unused in what would otherwise be normal practice. The `point-zero' suffix to his three "Globalization"s suggests that there may also be significant intermediate gradations, on the model of version numbers for software or draft documents; yet a browse of Freidman's book shows there to be (unsurprisingly) no textual occurrence of such. So why use it?
All in all, a disappointing read.
Book Review: You flatly must read this....
Summary: 5 Stars
For anyone involved in anything productive (from farming to parenting) you must read this brilliant explanation of how the world got to where it is today & what we must do (as global citizens) to be in the running in the future!
For once I have read a book on globalisation that's actually a page turner.
Book Review: A More Rounded View
Summary: 4 Stars
Other Amazon readers' reviews put me right off this book (all over in 10 pages etc). But my boss asked me to read it, so I persevered. I'm glad I did. Despite the 569 pages (not including anything so outmoded as a bibliography), and despite the many and often very lengthy examples and case-studies, not to mention the long quotes from other writers, there are important messages in this book. It's a good speed-read, if you get my drift. I recommend it on that basis.
Freidman makes a bold claim. Around 2000 a triple convergeance occurred which created a new historical era. Ten flatteners (i.e. changes) created a new, flatter, global playing field. Businesses and individuals (especially would-be zippies from India, China and the former Soviet Union) began to move from vertical to horizontal ways of creating value (i.e. doing business). People suddenly gained access to the flat world platform. Walls, ceiling and floors blew away. Out went command and control. In came connect and collaborate. Noone knows anymore who is exploiting who. Our jobs are being digitalized, automated and outsourced. To survive as a new untouchable middler you'd better become a great orchestrator, synthesizer, explainer, leverager, adapter, or a passionate personaliser. Failing that, just be brilliant, like Madonna or a cancer specialist. Failing that, just be well anchored, like a dustman.
Ok, I parody rather than paraphrase. Readable it always isn't. But that's got most of the bad stuff out of the way. Not all the quotes are bad: "It is a difference of degree so great - of low-cost interconnectivity, of individual empowerment, of global newworks for collaboration - that it is a difference in kind." This it least a bold and stimulating claim which is worthy of examination.
Freidman's central case is that in the first great age of globalisation, it was countries/ governments who first began to establish global collaborative links. Then it was companies. Now it's individuals. To put it another way, we've gone from hunting, to agriculture, to manufacturing industry, to services, to services delivered globally. To put it really badly, in a phrase that irritatingly won't leave my head, the Berlin Wall has become the Berlin Mall.
But aside from the central thesis there are some illuminating passages. Friedman gave me a lot of insight into terrorists. Typically, they are young, male, well-educated but also alienated by impersonal global economic changes and forces which affront their personal and cultural dignity and threaten their identity. Freidman calls them "neo-Leninists" and compares them with their 19th century European counterparts, the violent liberal, Marxist or anarchist revolutionaries, educated, middle class but displaced by industrialisation. This is a real historical insight. Also useful is the account of how terrorists utilise the new global platform. Bin Laden and friends used the internet to create their sinister and deadly "airline." The e bay praise points system is also interestingly analysed, as is the history of the anti-globalisation movement.
Freidman is not as naive about the new globalisation as some reviewers claim. He sees the dangers, of which the "Virtual Caliphate" is only one. But globalisation needn't mean Americanisation. It needn't destroy cultural identities because crucially, he argues, we can upload as well as download. The local can go global. We can all be players.
In what should be read as the companion volume, Evelyn Waugh's satire on journalism, "Scoop" (1939), inept foreign correspondents communicate from Africa to home via hilariously garbled telegrams. More global communication is probably not an unqualified good. But how great is the opposite?
But has the new connectivity really created Freidman's new global historical era? Waugh warns "of the innuendo and intricate misrepresentations, the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history", not to mention "the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise of screw." Maybe the world isn't flat. But read this book anyway to learn more about what's been happening globally in the past five minutes. Which is quite a lot. Please excuse me now, time to upload.
Book Review: The Best New Business Books You Need...and why...
Summary: 5 Stars
Kudo's to Thomas Friedman for bringing the much needed attention to the impending business issues of offshoring, globalization and outsourcing. Through interviewing influential executives at top technology companies in India and the US in particular, he has crafted a first-person journalist's trip report intertwined with personal anecdotes. The book has been critiqued as being a "how I spent my summer vacation" treatment of this serious subject of globalization which takes several hours to move through, this book is for you.
A more practically written and concise new book that I couldn't put down until I finished -- in just 2 hours is THE BLACK BOOK OF OUTSOURCING by Doug Brown & Dr Scott Wilson. I dog-earred and highlighted and post-it noted this perfect outsourcing reference manual and it sits directly on my desk for regular user.
THE BLACK BOOK OF OUTSOURCING has just been released in the last six months through Wiley Publishers, and it begins where Friedman left off. Not only does it encapsulate Friedman's message in just a few short pages, it goes on to provide thought-provoking ideas for action.
It's written by a business and technology experts and has contributions from a dozen other experts from the outsourcing and offshoring hot spots, including Shanghai, Taipei, Bangalore, Sydney, London, Singapore, and more. If you don't have the time to wade through Friedman's almost 500 pages, or if you have already and want to know more, I highly recommend THE BLACK BOOK OF OUTSOURCING.
Actually, together, they may an awesome team of books in your business arsenal.
Most Importantly, you don't have to be a globalist or economist or a free tank thinker to get this topic to you may think... "why bother reading such high brow stuff?"
Here's why.
Globalization will leave no nation, company or person untouched, including you and me. So, we'd better get ourslves ready for extreme competition. Friedman's Flat World and Brown & Wilson's THE BLACK BOOK OF OUTSOURCING will get you in a place of knowledge, history, business changes, effects, challenges and opportunities.
Botton Line: Buy both books together at discount. No better career advance training is so ready to lead you to a new global business player and executive.