The World Is Flat

Friedman's claim is that around 2000 a set of forces converged to level the global playing field, so that individuals and small firms in Bangalore or Dalian could compete for work that once stayed in the West. He names ten flatteners, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and Netscape's IPO through outsourcing, offshoring and supply-chaining. The result, he argues, is Globalization 3.0, driven by individuals rather than by countries (1.0) or multinationals (2.0).

Friedman was the New York Times foreign-affairs columnist, a three-time Pulitzer winner and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award in 2005 and was revised in 2006 and again in this 2007 Release 3.0, which adds further new chapters.

The critics were many. Joseph Stiglitz argued that in important ways the world was getting less flat, Richard Florida answered with an essay titled The World Is Spiky, Pankaj Ghemawat showed that about 90 percent of phone calls, web traffic and investment stayed local, and John Gray's review, titled The World Is Round, argued that interconnection was not making the world freer or more peaceful. At nearly 700 pages, the 3.0 edition also repeats itself.

Read it as a primary document of the consensus that drove offshoring, emerging-market investing and global supply-chain strategy, and as a baseline for judging how far reshoring and decoupling have since moved the world away from it.

1. Work moves to where it can be done best. Once a task can be broken into pieces and sent over a wire, it can be done anywhere, which redrew cost structures for banks, law firms and back offices.
2. Look for the convergence, not the single invention. Each flattener mattered less alone than in combination; the payoff came when new tools, new players such as China and India, and new business processes arrived together.
3. Make your work hard to ship. Friedman's safe jobs are the ones that are special, specialized, tied to a place or built on judgment and synthesis; routine analysis is the easiest to move.
4. Supply chains carry geopolitical weight. The Dell Theory holds that countries embedded in the same supply chain have strong economic reasons not to fight, but Friedman presents it as a cost of conflict, not a guarantee.
5. Test the thesis against the data. Ghemawat and Florida showed that trade, capital and talent stay concentrated, so measure how integrated a market really is before pricing in a flat world.

Friedman moves from how the world flattened to who wins and loses among countries and companies, then ends with geopolitics.

1. How the world became flat. He opens with his trip to Bangalore, walks through the ten flatteners, then describes the triple convergence of new players, a new playing field and new ways of collaborating, and the great sorting-out of rules and identities that follows.
2. America and the flat world. He argues that Ricardo's case for free trade still holds, describes the kinds of jobs that are hard to outsource, and warns of a quiet crisis in American science and engineering education.
3. Developing countries. Using Mexico's struggle to compete with China, he asks why some countries capture the gains of flattening and others don't, and points to reforms in governance, education and infrastructure.
4. Companies and cultures. He shows how firms large and small cope by collaborating across borders and supply chains and how local cultures go global, and two chapters new to Release 3.0 follow.
5. Geopolitics. He covers the unflat world of poverty and disease and the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention, then closes by contrasting 11/9 with 9/11 and arguing that imagination decides which way a flat world goes.