Globalization How the World Became Flat

GEORGE L. GRAZIADIO SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND MANAGEMENT MSOD 615

“In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny.” Thomas Friedman

“The modern business enterprise has no place to hide. It has no place to go

but everywhere.”

Nancy Adler

I. 10 Forces that Flattened the World II. America & the Flat World III.Developing Countries & the Flat World IV.Companies & the Flat World V. Conclusion

Contents

Ten Forces that Flattened the World 1. Fall of the Berlin Wall

2. When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public

3. Workflow Software

4. Uploading

5. Outsourcing

6. Offshoring

7. Supply Chaining

8. Insourcing

9. In-Forming

10. The Steroids (Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual)

Flattener 1 – 11/9/1989 – The New Age of Creativity: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

● The Berlin wall – a bizarre thing snaking across a modern city for the sole purpose of preventing

the people on the other side from enjoying freedom

● The fall of the wall liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire

● It tipped the balance of power across the world towards those advocating democratic,

consensual, free-market-oriented governance

● The Berlin Wall was blocking our ability to see the world as a single market, a single ecosystem,

and a single community

● While the positive effects of the wall coming down were immediately clear, the cause of the

wall’s fall was not so clear. There was no single cause

● The author points to one factor as very important, which is the information revolution that

began in the early to mid-1980s

Flattener 2 - 8/9/95 The New Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around & Netscape Went Public

● The breakthrough in connectivity, which allow for digital content to be sent anywhere at little cost so others can share it and work

on it, occurred in a few years in 1990s as the emergence of the Internet

● The world wide web was created in 1991 by a British computer scientist Time Bernes-Lee, who popularized the language for coding

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), which was designed to enable scientist to share their research more easily. Vint Cerf and Bob

Khan invented the Internet, which is a network of networks

● Internet is made from computers and cables designed to send a packet of information anywhere in the world under a second, such

as electronic mail, while the world wide web is an abstract space of information, and one can find computers, documents, sounds,

videos to information

● The first website is http://info.cern.ch and was first put up in August 6, 1991, explaining how the Web work, how to own a browser,

and how to setup a Web server to host a website. Within 5 years the Internet users jumped from 600,000 to 40 million

● The earliest browser was created by Netscape Navigator and on August 9, 1995, Netscape went public and world hasn’t been the

same because:

○ it was accessible to everyone from 5 years old to 95 years old,

○ the specialize the demands to easily digitalize words, music, data and photos

○ mobilizing digitalized files

○ the rollout of Windows 95 15 days after was the platform that support Netscape

● Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen are two now-legendary investors to bring Silicon Graphics and Mosaic together, renamed Netscape

Communications. Netscape’s first browser appeared December 1994 commercially

http://info.cern.ch/http://info.cern.ch/

● Years before the Web was commercialized, scientists were working on open protocols, such as TCP/IP to basically railroad track,

FTP to move files, SMTP and POP to move email messages, HTML was the code to write a webpage, HTTP enable people to view a

webpage, and SSL was created to provide security for Web-based transactions

● These open protocols were created to prevent companies like Microsoft from shifting the standards to proprietary protocols.

Netscape ensure this by commercializing browsing before it could be made proprietary

● By late 1990s, the value of compatibility was much higher for everyone than the value of trying to maintain your own little private

network. The integration of software platform was huge flattener

● The driver for the new adoption of dial-up was because people have an innate urge to connect with other people

● Netscape’s IPO opened at $71 and closed at $56 and fell victim to the overwhelming pressures of Microsoft’s decision to give

Internet Explorer for free. AOL bought Netscape for $10B

● The dot.com bubble brought the next wave of interested to digitize photos, books, songs, movies, etc.

● The overinvestments came in the form of fiber-optics as companies tried to lay massive amount of fiber-optic cable on land and

under the ocean. Fiber-optics can carry very high-frequency optical pulses on the same individual fiber without degradation for

many, many miles away

● The dot.com and the Telecommunication Act of 1996 launched the fiber-optic bubble. Long distance phone call went from $2 a

minute to $0.10 , and the telecom industry invested itself right out of business

● The fiber optics flatten the developed world. It helped to break down global regionalism, created a more seamless global

commercial network, and make it simple and almost free to move digitalized labor – service jobs and knowledge work – to lower

cost countries

Flattener 2 - 8/9/95 The New Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around & Netscape Went Public

● Case study cites Wild Brain, an animation studio based out of San Francisco

○ Production of the Disney Series Higglytown Heroes is an example of an “all-

world supply chain”

■ The recording session is “located near the artist” in New York or L.A.

■ Design and direction is done in San Francisco

■ Writers from Florida, London, New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco

■ Animation is done in Bangalore with edits from S.F.

● Workflow software became prominent in the mid- to late 1990’s

○ “had a profound impact on the world” because it allowed “more people in

more places to design, display manage, and collaborate on business data

previously handled manually”

Flattener 3 - Workflow Software

● Open source and shared web server platforms have allowed people to

collaborate across the globe for cheap or for free

● Uploading refers to the “newfound power of individuals and communities

to send up, out, and around their own products and ideas, often for free”

● Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine points out that “download rates far

exceeded upload rates. The dogma of the age held that ordinary people

had no need to upload; they were consumers not producers.”

● Friedman focuses on three primary forms of uploading as the primary

drivers for globalization: (next)

Flattener 4 - Uploading

● Community Developed Software

○ Also known as the “open source” community or “open sourcing” - the

idea that source code should be available for anybody to contribute or

improve upon the solution.

○ OpenOffice.org is a good example of high-quality alternatives to MS

Office

● Community-Developed Answers

○ Promotes the use of community development as “a tool to drive

software innovation” within companies

● Blogging: Uploading news and Commentary

○ Free sharing of personal ideas, perspectives, beliefs, values etc.

Flattener 4 - Uploading

● Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components

which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way

○ This process became easier with the mass distribution of fiber optic cables during the introduction of the World

Wide Web ● An example of outsourcing today is how it's possible to call a 1-800 number to contact AT&T and get a representative

with a strong foreign accent speaking to you in English, who actually resides in a foreign country ○ Friedman properly describes this flattener as making "the global playing field being leveled."

● According to Friedman this flattener occurred in 1999 involving India and the threat of the Y2K bug. India was brought in to the picture because they had a surplus of Engineers. These Engineers were called in to reprogram the whole system that the western world was based on

○ Fortunately for companies based in America, they were able to tap into India's surplus of engineers and save considerable time on such a huge task. These corporations were able to pay an Engineer based out of India considerably less than one in the U.S.

○ This not only saved money, but made a step towards potentially huge business relations. Translated to our present time we can see how it has changed the business world significantly; and consequently, our everyday life.

○ This is the birth, as Friedman describes it, of outsourcing

● This could not be possible without the tool that runs our lives today, the internet. The dot.com boom of the mid-1990's held strong during this birth and exploded in the business world

○ This broke the distance barrier in people's minds that India was half the globe away. Now with current globalization this distance becomes a straight line allowing such strong India-America, and similar, relations to exist

Flattener 5 - Outsourcing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K

● Different from Outsourcing ● When a company takes one of its factories that is operating in Ohio and moves the whole factory to

China ○ Produces same product in the same way but with cheap labor, lower taxes, subsidized energy

and lower healthcare costs

○ Helps gain foreign markets without having to worry about trade barriers

● China took Offshoring to a new level ○ “China is a threat, China is a customer, and China is an opportunity”

● Other developing countries saw the success of offshoring with China and began to compete ● China not only wants to make the underwear or cell phone parts, but they want to design them as

well ○ Investing in math, science, computer skills, telecom

○ Gearing up to be a major flattening force

● Since mid 1990s offshoring to China has saved US consumers $600 Billion and US manufacturers untold billions in cheap labor

● Many Americans think offshoring is a lose-lose situation. In reality it: ○ Stimulates American exports and helps create jobs in the US.

○ Offshoring also comes to America as many countries want access to our markets and labor

Flattener 6 - Offshoring

Flattener 7 – Supply Chaining: Based on a Wal-Mart Distribution Center as Example

● Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas – 1.2-million-square-foot distribution center

● At one side of the building, scores of trucks are dropping off boxes for thousands of different

suppliers

● Boxes are fed up a conveyor belt – 24 hours a day, seven days a week

● An electric eye reads the barcodes on each box on its way to the other building

● There, a “river” parts into 100 “streams”

● Electric arms from each stream reach out and guide the boxes – ordered by particular Wal-Mart

stores – to another conveyor belt which places the boxes in a Wal-Mart truck

● The truck rushes to a particular store, where the product is placed on a shelf

● The customer takes the product off the shelf, the cashier scans it in, a signal will be generated

● Signal goes to the supplier so he can add this product to his production planning and the cycle

starts all over again

● Unique new flattener and new form of collaboration ○ Global supply chain ‘gave birth’ to insourcing

○ 3rd party managed logistics

● UPS – huge flattening force ● Not just about brown shorts and delivering packages – also synchronizing global supply chains for companies

○ UPS engineers go inside your business, analyze its manufacturing, packaging and delivery processes and designs, redesigns and manages whole global supply chain

○ Helps small companies go global; small can now act big

● Example: if you have a Toshiba computer, not only can you ship it back for repairs via UPS, but UPS will actually repair your computer in its own UPS workshop by UPS employees who are Toshiba certified and then ship back to you, increasing efficiency and eliminating extra shipping steps

● Order Nikes online? The order is routed to UPS who will pick, inspect and and deliver your shoes to you ○ Nike would rather spend money and energy on designing new tennis shoes, not global supply chains

● UPS has its own 60 person think tank to work on supply-chain algorithms, its own financial arm – UPS Capital, and its own meteorologists and strategic threat analysts to track atmospheric and geopolitical thunderstorms

● UPS is largest private user of wireless technology through the over 1 million calls its drivers make a day ● At any given day 2% of the world's GDP can be found in UPS drivers trucks ● “UPS and its employees are so deep inside their clients infrastructure, it’s almost impossible to determine where

one stops and the other starts”

Flattener 8 - Insourcing

● Google and other search engines are the prime example.

○ Never before in the history of the planet have so many people – on their own – had the ability to find so

much information about so many things and about so many other people

○ The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, now processing roughly one

billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago

● There is no bigger flattener than the idea of making all the world’s knowledge, or even just a big chunk of it,

available to anyone and everyone, anytime, anywhere

○ The ability for individuals to use web-based search engines to find almost any kind of information they

want is a total equalizer

○ Individuals no longer have to rely on editors, libraries, television, or movie theaters to get the information

and entertainment they want

● Before the search engine empowered web, an individual’s access to information was limited by such things as

geography (rural towns didn’t fare so well), access to repositories of information (for instance, university

libraries were limited to students and professors), and time.

○ Friedman says that by providing almost instant access from a home computer to an increasingly vast

amount of information and other resources (e.g., music, video, maps, photographs, etc) makes individuals

into their own supply-chains. Individuals are now their own researchers, editors, and consumers

○ Friedman calls this ability, “informing”

Flattener 9 - Informing

● Certain new technologies are now steroids because they are amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners. These steroids are taking

outsourcing, offshoring, uploading, supply-chaining, insourcing and in-forming and making it possible to each every one of them in way that is digital,

mobile, virtual and personal. Making the world flatter by the day

● Carly Fiorina, HP CEO, defines steroids by means of “digital”, “virtual, “mobile”, and “personal”

○ “Digital” means everything from photography to entertainment to communication to word processing can be digitized

○ “Virtual” the process of shaping, manipulating and transmitting over the digitized content can be done at very high speeds and with total ease,

○ “Mobile”, Fiorina means that thanks to wireless technology, all this can be done from anywhere, with anyone, and can be taken anywhere

○ “Personal” can be done by you, just for you, on your own device

● The six steroids are

○ The first steroid has to do with computing, which is computational capability, storage capability, and input/output capability; essentially the

speed at which the information is in and out of the computer

○ The second steroid involves breakthroughs in the instant messaging and file sharing

■ Processing of data has increased because chipmakers have increased their processing of chips from 60,000 instructions per second in

1971 to 20 billion instructions per second in 2007

■ Outputting data have leaped ahead at a staggering rate; advances in fiber optics will soon allow a single fiber to carry terabit per second,

permitting unlimited transmitting capacity at zero incremental cost

○ The third steroid involves breakthroughs in making phone calls over the Internet, especially with voice over Internet protocol service, known as

VoIP. It will make business and personal calls as cheap as local calls, i.e., almost free

■ Companies, like Eriksn Translations Inc. spend up to $1,000 a month in phone bills, but with the Skype protocol, the company’s coast has

fallen almost 10%.

● The competition among companies will be SoIP (services over the Internet Protocol) who can provide the best video conferencing

● Accountants who live in Bangalore or Beijing can list themselves in the New York Yellow Pages to develop business around the

world

Flattener 10 – The Steroids (Digital, Mobile, Personal, & Virtual)

○ The fourth steroid is videoconferencing. HP and DreamWorks are collaborating on a design for videoconferencing suite, marrying DW’s movie

and sound expertise with HP computing and compression technology.

■ The cost for one of these video conferencing rooms will be $250,000, which is nothing compared to the airline tickets and the wear

○ The fifth steroid is video advances in computer graphics, driven in part by video games. This has enhance the way images appear on a screen

○ The sixth steroid, and may be the most important, is the new wireless technology devices. These are the ubersteroids

■ The new form of collaboration, mobile, so manipulation, sharing and shaping digital content can occur anywhere

■ The natural state of communication is wireless

■ Your desk goes with you everywhere you are now

■ The problem of distance between people is no longer a problem

■ We are rapidly approaching the “mobile me” age/revolution

● There is a movement to allow payment by mobile phone

○ Like smartcard, the phone can be scanned and it can act as a credit card

○ The mobile phone will become the essential controller of a person’s life

○ For the medical field, it will be the authentication system and examine medical records

○ It will allow for making payments

○ It will can control things at home

● These steroids will make uploading that much more open, allowing more people to collaborate with one another

● As a result of these steroids, engines can now talk to computers, people can talk to people, computers can talk to computers, and people can talk to

computers farther, faster, more cheaply and more easily than before

Flattener 10 – The Steroids (Digital, Mobile, Personal, & Virtual)

● Even as the world gets flat, Americans as a whole will benefit more from sticking to its free trade principles ● Individuals now need to start thinking globally to thrive and survive

○ Need the right knowledge, skills, mental flexibility and self motivation to get the jobs – every American is competing with every Chinese, Indian, Brazilian

○ You don’t want to be mediocre

● Middle Class Jobs are now being threatened by the 10 flatteners ● The New Middlers – jobs that will make up the new middle class in the flat world

○ Great collaborators & orchestrators: managers who can work and orchestrate global supply chains 24/7 across 7 continents; good people skills

○ The Great Synthesizers: “jobs that put disparate things together that you would not think go together”

○ The Great Explainers: ie managers, journalists, teachers, editors who can explain complexity with simplicity

○ The Great Leveragers: combining the best of what humans and computers can do

○ The Great Adapters: jobs that are adaptable and versatile, constantly learning & growing

○ The Green People: sustainable and renewable jobs

○ The Passionate Personalizers: jobs that involve pure passion & something special

○ Math Lovers: new world of numbers

○ The Great Localizers: jobs that help “localize the global”

America & The Flat World (1 of 2)

● Right stuff for the new Middle Class in the Flat World ○ “Learn how to learn”: need to love learning

○ Navigation: navigating the world wide web

○ PQ + CQ > IQ: curiosity and passion matter more in the flat world

○ Stressing Liberal Arts: horizontal form of education that helps connect

the dots to become great synthesizers

○ Right Brain: nurture more of the creative thought; do something you love

America & The Flat World (2 of 2)

The Virgin of Guadalupe ● For Mexico, when your claim to fame is low-wage manufacturing, and some of the people are importing statues of the Mexico's patron saint,

the Virgin of Guadalupe, from China, it is a flat world ● Governor Ortiz stared at the numbers in his computer and in 2001 for the first time in two decades Mexico export to US had declined ● Chinese central bank official told a Mexican journalist: "first we were afraid of the wolf, then we wanted to dance with the wolf, and now we

want to be the wolf." ● Lamesse El-Hadidy, A long time business report in Cairo, notice that the lanterns that were once made for Ramadan in Cairo is now replaced by

a Chinese made Ramadan lanterns. ● Egyptian mothers appreciate the fact that Chinese Ramadan lanterns are safer than traditional Egyptian ones, which are made with sharp

metal edges and glass. The Chinese versions are made of plastic and featuring flashing lights and have an embedded microchip that play traditional songs

● With superior technology, China can make mass quantities, which helps to keep prices are relatively low; Egypt’s traditional industry, by contrast, is characterized by a series of workshops specialized in different stages of the production process.

● Think how crazy with the statement is: Egypt has masses of low-wage workers, like China. It's right next to Europe, but it could be and should be the Taiwan of the eastern Mediterranean

Introspection

● What extent is my country advancing or being left behind by flattening of the world, and to what extent is adapting and taking advantage of all

the new platforms for collaboration and competition? ● I believe that what the world needs today is a club that model after alcoholics Anonymous, AA. It would be called developing country

anonymous DCA. My name is Syria and I'm underdeveloped. My name is Argentina and I'm underachieving. I have not lived up to my potential ● Each country needs to the ability to make its own introspection ● When you and I were born a we knew the competition with next-door neighbors. Today our competition is a Japanese or a Frenchman or

Chinese. You know where you are rank very quickly in a flat world… You're not competing with everyone else

Developing Countries & The Flat World (1 of 4)

I Can Get It For You Wholesale ● The first infrastructure is to connect more of your people with the flat platform – from cheap internet bandwidth and mobile phone to modern

airports and roads ● The second is the right educational system to get more of your people innovating and collaborating on the flat-world platform. ● The third is the right governance – from fiscal policy to the rule of law to the quality of the bureaucracy – to manage the flow between your people

and the flat world platform in the most productive way ● Fourth you need the right environment. Countries that preserve their green spaces are much more likely to preserve and attract the knowledge

workers ● The adoption of better governance was like adopting market-friendly macroeconomic policies, the “reform of wholesale” ● The reform was initiated by China, Russia, Mexico, Brazil and India. “Black cat, white cat, all that matter is that it catches mice” ● That is why those nonglobilzing countries refused to reform saw their per capita GDP shrink in the 1990s ● 375 million people in China experienced extreme poverty of less than $1 in 1990, 212 million people in 2001, and 16 million by 2015. In Africa,

globalization was slow to take, 227 million people lived in poverty in 1990, 313 million in 2001, and 340 million in 2015. A deeper reform was required

I Can Get It For You Retail

● It presumes that you have already done reform wholesale. Reform retail involves looking at the infrastructure, education, and governance and

upgrade each one, so more of your people have the tools and legal framework to innovate and collaborate at the highest level. ● Most of the key elements of reform retail was designed by World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) ● If you want to create productive jobs and stimulate growth of new business, you need a regulatory environment that makes it easy to start a

business, easy to adjust a business to changing market circumstances and opportunities, and easy to close a business that goes bankrupt, so that the capital can be freed up for the more productive uses

● It takes 2 days to start a business in Australia, 203 days in Haiti, and 215 days in Democratic Republic of Congo ● Excessive regulation also tends to hurt most the very people it was supposed to protect. ● 5-step checklist to reform retail: 1.) Simplify and deregulate wherever possible in competitive markets, 2.) Focus on enhancing poverty rights, 3.)

Expand the use of the Internet for regulation fulfillment, 4.) Reduce court involvement in business matter, and 5.) Make reform a continuous process

Developing Countries & The Flat World (2 of 4)

Follow The Leapin’ Leprechauns

● Ireland went from the poor man of Europe to rich man of the EU by turning around the fundamental government policies. The government,

the main trade unions, farmers, and industrialists came together and agreed on a program of fiscal austerity, slashing corporate taxes to

12.5%, moderating wages, and prices, and aggressively courting foreign investment. ● In 1996, public college education was basically free, creating an even more educated workforce. Dell Computer and Intel opened shop in

Ireland because of the wealth of knowledge. Ireland kept their labor laws flexible, some jobs would go, and new jobs would keep coming. Ireland was playing offense

● Capital is not looking for the cheapest labor from around the world. It is looking for the most productive labor at the lowest price, which means to attract capital your country must get the four basics right: 1.) Infrastructure, 2.) Education, 3.) Governance, and 4.) Environment

Culture Matters: Glocalization

● Why do some countries overcome this retail reform hump, with leaders able to mobilize their people to really improve their infrastructure,

education, governance, and other countries stall? One answer is culture. ● Culture maintains continuity through values and attitude from generation to generation through child rearing, education, media, and

leadership as well as religion, which may be the most salient of all. Some religions and cultures are “progressive prone” and some are “progressive resistant”

● The more you have a culture that naturally glocalizes, the more your culture easily absorbs foreign ideas and global best practices and meld with its own tradition, and the greater advantage you have in the flat world

● Cultures that are open and willing to change have a huge advantage in this world ● This explains why so many Muslim countries have been struggling as the world goes flat. Many of the Muslim countries resist glocalization ● When tolerance is the norm, everyone flourishes because tolerance breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of innovation and

entrepreneurship ● Countries without natural resources are much more likely, through human evolution, to develop the habits of openness to new ideas,

because it is the only way they can survive ● Culture can change since it is a product of geography, education, level of leadership, and historical experiences

Developing Countries & The Flat World (3 of 4)

The Intangible Things

Even though China is miles away, it is growing closer to American economically, while Mexico, right on America’s border, is becoming thousands of miles

away. ● China has many more intangibles, such as an ability to summon and focus on local energies on reform retail. Centralized power:

○ Promote a lot of people on the merit of key decision-making process ○ Promote and protect the state ○ Tradition of meritocracy

● Mexico moved from a one party authoritarian state to a multiparty democracy. Decentralized power: ○ Wider consensus to push the reforms in a democratic context ○ Herding cats ○ Latin history is rooted in history of local interest rather than national interests

● Culture play an important aspect when a culture values education, such as China and India. Mexico only has 10,000 US medical students compare to China’s and India’s 50,000 US medical students

● Mexico’s political systems are not capable of processing and adopting and executing those retail reforms ● It was about China’s advantages in education, privatization, infrastructure, quality control, mid-level management, and the introduction of new

technology. “China is eating Mexico for lunch” ● It takes 55 days to start a business in Mexico, 8 days in Singapore, and 9 days in Turkey ● The fact of economic life: no place can remain the low-cost producer for ever ● “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”

Many Speeds, One Direction

● When done right and in a sustainable manager, globalization has huge potential to life large numbers of people out of poverty. A large number of

people escaping poverty in places like India, China, or Ireland and reaping the benefits. ● There are many speeds that a country can go at down this globalization path, and each country has to choose the right speed for its particular social

and political circumstances, but there is only one right direction

Developing Countries & The Flat World (4 of 4)

Companies and the Flat World: How companies cope (1 of 2)

● Entrepreneurs and CEO’s were responding to the flattening of the world by saying “Just in the

last years….”

● They were figuring out strategies on how to cope with and how to survive in this new

environment

● Economist Paul Romer: “Everyone wants economic growth, but nobody wants change.”

● Companies which are successful are those which that are most prepared to change

● Example - a company which is making traditional Peruvian ceramics now cheaply in China and

have them shipped directly to the US from there

● Uruguay has come from nowhere to partner with India’s biggest software company, Tata

Consultancy Services, to create in just 5 years one of the largest outsourcing operations in

Latin America

● Today, anyone can – with the right imagination, Internet bandwidth, and

some capital – assemble a global company by matching workers and

customers from anywhere to do anything for anyone

● Example: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who

are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux

City company for customers in Kuwait

● Multinational companies like the idea of spreading

out their risks and not having all their outsourcing

done from India

Companies and the Flat World: How companies cope (1 of 2)

11/9 Versus 9/11 ● 11/9 and 9/11 represents the two competing forms of imagination at work in the world today:

the creative imagination of 11/9 and the destructive imagination of 9/11 ○ One brought down a wall and opened the windows of the world

● There has never been a time in history when human imagination wasn’t important, but it has been more important than ever due to the flattening of the world with so many opportunities for collaboration available

● Advances in technology - from iris scans to X-ray machines - will help us to identify, expose, and capture those who are trying to use the easily available tools of the flat world to destroy it

● In the end, technology cannot alone keep us safe ○ Need to find ways to affect the imagination of those who would use the tools of

collaboration to destroy the world that has invented those tools

● Imagination is the product of two shaping forces ○ One is the narratives that people are nurtured on - the

stories and myths they and their religious and national leaders tell themselves - and how those narratives feed their imaginations one way or another

Conclusion

“Managers with a global mindset address strategic business decisions as

cosmopolitans, always considering the broader world picture rather than

just the local situation.”

Nancy Adler

“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.”

Thomas Friedman

Friedman, T.L. (2007). The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (3rd edition). Picador Publishers.

Adler, N. (2008). International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior (5th edition). Cincinnati, OH: Southwestern College

Publishing.

References

Additional Resources

http://youtube.com/v/3oTLyPPrZE4http://youtube.com/v/KuWXfjyGhk0http://youtube.com/v/IclRM-yYXc0