At first, this book scared the crap out of me.

Then, it validated what I write about on my blog.

Finally, it made me think. It made me think a whole lot.

Thomas L. Friedman has three more Pulitzer Prizes than I do and at the suggestion of one of my bosses, I picked up The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. This book is primarily about about globalization, a topic I know well given that I routinely have 7am Pacific meetings with people in Europe to discuss projects that are developed by offshore teams in India, China, and Latin America. A similar set of stories is told in the first chapter, “While I was Sleeping”, which covers outsourcing not only of manufacturing, customer service, and software development jobs, but goes as far to suggest that the day when reservations at the local Olive Garden are taken by an offshore call center aren’t too far behind.

This was the part that scared me. It scared me because of all the people I’ve seen over the years whose jobs have been replaced by someone overseas at a quarter the cost. It scared me because maybe my employability isn’t as safe as I thought it was. But, it even scared me for the people in India and China I work with now because Eastern Europe and Latin America are breathing down their necks in terms of talent nurturing, their command of the English language is better than you’d think, they have a distinct time zone advantage, and rates that undercut traditional outsourcing locations.

What happens when Africa or the Middle East positions itself to participate in this phenomenon at rates cheaper than previous waves of workers? What happens next? How do you stay ahead of the curve and pay your mortgage?

Getting me to ask myself those questions is, of course, Friedman’s intent. Hence, the Pulitzers.

Friedman then suggests 10 phenomena that flattened the world (the fall of the Berlin Wall opening up previously closed markets and Netscape going public to spark the dot-com boom among them are the biggies), the Triple Convergence the followed, and how we’re all still sorting out how these things work. The best story of the sort out involves the state of Indiana, which in 2003 needed to update its computer systems for its unemployment office. An Indian firm came in with the low bid for the job by more than $8M, which meant a cheaper price for the taxpayers of Indiana but fewer jobs for the workers of Indiana. So, what’s the right answer if you are the Governor of Indiana? These are the kinds of things that need soring out in a flattened world.

At this point in the book, I was pretty depressed. Not just for me, but for my daughter too. She’s 6 now, but what kind of jobs will be available for her in 20 years given this big economic jumble that political and technology shifts have created?

Again, point to the Pulitzers. In the section entitled “America and the Flat World”, Friedman examines the US educational system (and I was reminded of many of the themes in Nerds: Who they are and why we need more of them) and what it takes to insulate yourself from being exposed career-wise.

That’s when I felt validated for these writings here, as his answer is that you have to have skills that cannot be outsourced. Lots of people can write the code or even design it, not as many can present the rationale to marketing and upper management. Fewer people can invoke the creativity necessary to synthesize ideas from radically different systems to suggest a better whole. That’s where the safety zone is.

The last sections made me think a whole lot about politics and the state of the world today. He discusses factors that threaten to unflatten the world in a very bad way, the most sobering being the closely related issues around energy and environment. It covers how, in a flat world, a 17 year old boy with cerebral palsy can run a successful eBay business, but terrorists can launch an attack at the United States from a cave in Afghanistan.

There’s some deep, deep stuff here at the end and I find I can’t stop thinking about it a week later. How long that will continue, I’m not sure, but it’s a worthy read for just about anybody.

Technorati Tags: book report, economics, globalization, the world is flat

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