Prior to the publication of Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, Friedman had written best-selling books "From Beirut to Jerusalem" and "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" as an expert on Middle East issues.
The title page of the book reads: "Innovation makes you different".
I agree with this sentence, and the increasingly fierce market competition has made enterprises realize that the market and profits are basically prepared for innovators and leaders. Although innovation is a concept that requires restraint and publicity, the value it brings does enrich the globalized industrial chain, and today, innovation makes the continuous integration of products and technologies, which are constantly creating new value.
500 years ago, Columbus traveled the world using the rudimentary navigation techniques of the time, and he returned safely and told the world that the world was round. Today, Friedman found in India that the world is flat. The conclusion that the world is flat was initially shocked by India's software outsourcing industry. Friedman was so shocked by the dramatic changes in globalization brought about by technological change that he felt that "the world is getting flatter and flatter while I am asleep!" ”
In this book, Friedman uses his unique perspective to divide into six major sections about the process of the world being flattened:
How the world became flat
America and the Flat World
Developing countries with a flat world
Company with a flat world
Geopolitics and a flat world
Conclusion: Imagine
How did the world become flat? What does the fact that the world is flattening mean?
In today's interconnected world, which is closely connected and convenient by information technology, everything is possible in the most efficient and lowest cost way possible. Therefore, the symbol of wealth in today's era is already a breakthrough in software, intelligence, composite algorithms, advanced technicians, call centers, transmission protocols, and optical technologies. Friedman believes that the flat world is a combination of personal computers, fiber optic cables and workflow software, and that the main driving force of globalization today is no longer the state, no longer the company, but the individual. To illustrate this conclusion, Friedman divides globalization into three phases.
The first phase lasted from 1492 to 1800. This is the Globalization 1.0 version, which tells the story of countries and power, and the main question is what is the position of my country in the global competition? How I go abroad and use the power of my country to work with others.
The second phase lasted from 1800 to 2000. This is version 2.0 of globalization, and the main force driving globalization is multinational corporations, which have to go abroad to find markets and labor.
After 2000, the 3.0 version of globalization, when the competition field is leveled, the driving force is the cooperation and competition of individuals on a global scale, while China and India will form a strong competition against European and American countries at this stage.
America and the Flat World.
When Friedman discovered that democratization, computers and the Internet, open source software, outsourcing and offshore operations, supply chain management technologies, search engines, etc. had become the main driving force for leveling the world, more and more people, especially the popularity of the developing countries India and China, began a new life and new opportunities because they entered the globalized economy.
As an American, from the perspective of americans, looking at the impact of technology trends such as outsourcing and the Internet, Friedman first realized that the possibilities brought by technological changes allowed India, Chinese to participate in the new global competition, and because of the low price of labor, the two countries became more and more powerful in international competition, and the United States thus created many problems such as job loss and industrial hollowing. But at the same time, through interviews with many Indian outsourcing companies, especially these companies are mostly american investors who hold the majority of the shares, Friedman also has to admit that Americans not only enjoy the services of cheap labor, but also share in the capital appreciation of these enterprises.
In this book, Friedman depicts scenes of interviews in great detail, especially the conversations between him and his interviewees. One scenario is that Jerry Rao's company, a Mumbai native, takes on a lot of financial outsourcing from U.S. states, the federal government, and accounting firms, serving these Americans through software and Internet technologies they develop themselves.
Friedman: "Most of this work is outsourced to you, what do those accountants in the United States do?" ”
Rao: "Accountants in the United States don't have to stay in the office at all, they can sit on the beach in California and email us and say, 'Rao, you're very good at new york state tax filings, and Tom's declarations are handed over to you.'" Sonia, you and your companions are responsible for several tax returns in Washington and Florida. The other declarations are more complicated, so I will complete them myself. By the way, Sonia works from home, and the company doesn't have to pay her at all. ”
It is not difficult for us to find from such questions and answers: American accountants can have a better working environment, more leisure time, get closer to customers, do more work with higher added value, and in the future competition, their competitiveness will be stronger.
Today, the development of the vast majority of enterprises depends on the ability to achieve their own value in customer value, then, who is closer to the customer, who can more keenly grasp the changing trend of customer needs, so as to more quickly meet customer needs, to obtain their own development.
Outsourcing some cumbersome, decomposable, low-end business at a lower cost, and setting aside time and energy to get closer to customers, is a good thing for the United States, both inside and out.
The whole world has been changed in the wave of globalization, and in Friedman's eyes, the gradual flattening of the world is not simply competition between countries, but also the transformation of state power structures and corporate business models. But when we put together books and stand in our own shoes, from the position of developing countries, we can't help but ask ourselves a question: Is the world flat?
Returning to the book, Friedman summarizes the 10 driving forces that level the world, the first 4 of which are:
On November 9, 1989, the era of innovation came - the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of the Windows operating system;
On August 9, 1995, the advent of the Internet era - the emergence of the Web and the listing of Netscape;
Workflow software – to get people's applications to talk to each other;
Upload harnessing the power of community.
The fall of the Berlin Wall not only gave more people access to each other's knowledge webs, but also helped them accept common standards, including standards for economic operations, accounting standards, banking standards, standards for making computers, and standards for writing economic papers.
These common standards created a flattering platform for competition, so the personal computers loaded with the Windows operating system, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, set the stage for the world to flatten.
Then Netscape, which once shone like a brilliant meteor across the sky, came to the scene, and she created the first popular browser, it was the use of commercial browsers that made it easy for every ordinary person to learn to surf the Internet; it also created standards for data transmission and display, making the network truly interoperable. This revolution in Internet technology has driven the process of world leveling.
Working collaboratively between people in the same region or in different regions, supported by computing network devices, workflow platforms allow people to divide up work, standardize it, and assign it to the best people who can get the job done.
At the same time, in the world of the Internet, people are no longer just consumers, but more and more producers, whether individual or collective uploads, are already becoming a powerful factor in leveling the world. There are three main forms of upload that Friedman focuses on: the community development software movement (also known as the open source community), Wikipedia, and blogs/podcasts.
Because almost everyone who can access the Internet can write a blog and express their own opinions, thus breaking the monopoly of the traditional media on information, this situation may lead to inconsistent news reports, but it better ensures the authenticity of the public's access to information.
The flattening of the world has brought a shock to the software industry.
From another point of view, it is the application of software that changes the meaning of time and space. In the ancient literary theory work "Wenxin Carved Dragon", Liu Xun once fantasized that "therefore silent and contemplative, thinking for thousands of years; quietly moving, seeing through thousands of miles." "What used to be read as an imagination seems to have become a fact today.
So some people say that it is software that makes the world flat.
Friedman summarized the top 10 driving forces that level the world, the next 6 of which are outsourcing, offshore operations, supply chains, insourcing, search engines and other new technologies.
Because India has no natural resources to use, it pays special attention to the development of the brain capital of its citizens and has produced a large number of scientific, engineering and medical elites. However, until the mid-1990s, India could not provide a good job opportunity for most scientific and technological talents, and the ideal choice for Indian talents at that time was to go to the United States. When the world became flat, the United States found that it could harness its abundant human capital on indian soil. With the advent of the new century, the Y2K computer crisis - "Millennium Worm" has also arrived, the opportunity has favored these prepared minds of India, in the face of Y2K, the United States and India began to strengthen cooperation, which greatly promoted the process of world leveling. The combination of personal computers, networks and fiber-optic cables offers a new way of creating value at a new level of collaboration and level: outsourcing. When the Y2K problem was solved, a new business opportunity emerged: e-commerce, because cooperation was not slowing down, but accelerating.
China officially joined the World Trade Organization on December 11, 2001, and China's accession to the WTO has promoted another form of cooperation with immeasurable force: offshore operations. Just as Y2K has taken India and the world to a whole new level of outsourcing, WTO accession has taken China and the world to a whole new level of offshore operations. Some people understand that the reason why China has been able to develop offshore business cooperation is because China has a large number of cheap labor costs, and low cost is true, but low cost is high efficiency is China's real advantage.
Friedman used Walmart and UPS as examples to elaborate on the two levels of cooperation in supply chain and insourcing. The supply chain is carried out between suppliers, retailers and customers for the purpose of creating value, while insourcing is a logistics method that is different from the supply chain and managed by a third party. They are both products of a flat world and play an important role in leveling the world.
Google, Yahoo, and MSN's search services for people make it easier and faster to visualize almost all the information they need, and new digital, mobile, personal, and virtual technologies are amplifying or enhancing all the other forces that level the world.
These 10 driving forces began to converge, creating a new platform for the world. Merchants and individuals then began to embrace new habits, technologies, and processes, shifting from a vertical value creation model to a horizontal value creation model, and the combination of a new world platform and a new way of doing business achieved the second largest convergence. Finally, when the flattening process unfolded in a new way, people from countries such as China, India, and the former Soviet Union participated in competition and cooperation, and began the third major convergence. This is what Friedman summed up as a triple confluence.
Speaking of manufacturing, let's start with a digression.
Manufacturing industry is one of the main symbols of the country's comprehensive competitiveness, is an important foundation of the national economy, is the main body of the country's industrialization industry, any big country, for its own development, the development of manufacturing industry will rise to the level of national strategy. The United States has always been the strongest manufacturing country in the world. I have also always believed that China is also a big manufacturing country. When I was still in college, I was impressed by a sentence from a teacher. The teacher said to us very seriously in class: "China only has a processing industry, not a real sense of manufacturing." "It was 1998, I was shocked to hear this sentence, the proportion of manufacturing in China's GDP has always been relatively high, if the teacher's words are right, then China at that time, is not even the country's comprehensive competitiveness have to be questioned."
Today, many years later, the world's leading manufacturing country is still the United States. Part of the reason for this is that as more and more jobs move to developing countries such as China, and developing countries are immersed in basic jobs, more and more Americans are liberated from those basic jobs and concentrate their abilities on more creative things, thus further enhancing the competitiveness of Americans.
Therefore, in the process of globalization led by European and American enterprises, domestic enterprises are in a relatively weak position in terms of technology, management and capital. Although China's manufacturing industry has also achieved great development, but its level and the united States as the representative of the international advanced level is still a gap, the productivity is low; energy consumption is large, pollution is serious; the product is mainly low-end, the added value is not high is still a problem facing China's manufacturing industry, I don't know if the teacher's point of view has changed. History has taught us that the world may still be bumpy for Chinese companies.
Along the line of thinking of manufacturing: manufacturing is the main body of the industrial body of industrialization, the realization of industrialization is still a difficult historical task in the process of modernization in China, informatization is an inevitable choice for China to accelerate the realization of industrialization and modernization, and the key to informatization lies in software, if the world is really becoming flat, then where is the opportunity for China's software to develop?
Taking middleware as an example, middleware is another important basic software after the operating system and database, and the space for the construction of the technical architecture platform with middleware as the core is the mainstream direction of the development of the international software industry in the next few years. But in the case that China's operating system and database have not developed, can middleware develop?
Although the word "ping" is easily reminiscent of the concept of "equality", and then think of respect, trust, cooperation and sharing, and so on. But when the world is changing from a vertical value creation model to an increasingly horizontal value creation model, when the original command and control has become today's connection and cooperation, and each of us is at the beginning of a large-scale, global change in habits, then whether each of us can be fully respected and trusted, and whether we can truly participate in equal cooperation and sharing, depends on what?
Friedman is also showing that when the world has flattened, it does not mean that people in this world are becoming more and more equal. As an American, Friedman's first consideration was the impact of world flattening on the United States and how Americans could avoid the shock of flattening.
The flattening of the world as a whole is good for The United States, but as an individual, an individual person, only with a sufficient level of knowledge, technology, creativity, and self-motivation can seize the opportunity, and this conclusion is equally convincing for every individual Chinese.
Americans are accustomed to defining the middle class, and Friedman believes that the work of the emerging middle class requires a person to be a good collaborator, operator, adaptor, interpreter, integrator, model builder, localizer, or personality worker, and requires a person to learn how to learn, always have curiosity and passion at work, be able to get along with others, and develop right-brain skills. These suggestions, although aimed at Americans, are also useful for people from any country who want to participate in the competition in the world.
When the world becomes flat, the development of a country depends on three basic tasks: infrastructure (from network broadband and mobile phones to modern airports and roads, which connect their own people with the whole flat world), The right education (bringing more creative and collaborative people to the flat world platform) and the right regulation (from fiscal policies to laws and regulations, managing the interaction between the people of their country and the flat world platform in the most productive way available).
Through interviews and analysis, Friedman believes that developing countries should look at themselves more objectively, find their own position in relations with other countries, and adopt a series of effective policies to create a favorable environment for their companies to survive in a flat world.
These policies include macroeconomic reforms that will lead to more open and competitive markets, and the adaptation of infrastructure, regulatory institutions, education and culture-building that can help people to participate more actively in worldwide cooperation.
The reason why cultural construction is also specifically mentioned here is because every country, developed or developing country, in the process of world leveling, its culture will have an impact in two aspects. Needless to say, a culture that is open and does not reject new elements is more dominant.
On the one hand, a country's culture can help the country better accept different cultures and complete the combination of globalization and localization; on the other hand, a country's traditional culture can help the government better unite and unite its own people and complete common cooperation.
The process of globalization, while assimilating different cultures, has also helped some countries and regions to further promote and display their local cultures, and the entire worldwide competition platform has made various cultures appear together to an unprecedented extent, the difference is that some countries have chosen to protect and carry forward their own local cultures, while some countries are more confused.
If the world is really getting flatter, and every country, every business, and even individual has been hit by globalization, it seems that for the developing countries of the third world, competition is becoming equal, and opportunities in competition are becoming equal, is this really the case?
When Friedman talks about how companies can deal with flattening, he offers a series of suggested strategies that he believes are necessary so that companies can take advantage of a flat world. These strategies include: when companies feel the pressure to flatten the world, they should tap their potential to meet the challenge; small businesses must quickly use all the new tools that promote cooperation to make themselves more scalable, faster, broader, and deeper; when the development and dissemination of technology allows large companies to cooperate with their customers in a newer way, large companies should learn to provide self-service to customers, my understanding is that customers are involved in the design and improvement of the company's products and services; in a flat world More and more work, both internal and external, need to cooperate to complete, therefore, the best companies are those who are the best at cooperation; good companies should always be clear about their core business, as well as the core competitiveness of the company, and adjust the investment; the company's transfer of business should be to accelerate the progress of reform, reduce costs, increase market share, is to grow and expand.
These strategies, of course, are all good suggestions and are supported by practical examples, but in China, the current situation of almost all companies is completely different from that of American companies. Although Friedman also mentions in the book, countries and regions such as China, India and the former Soviet Union, which were once far surpassed by developed countries, have become the world's most high-profile emerging markets. However, for third world countries, more efforts are needed to obtain a more equal opportunity to compete, to take a firm position in competition, or even to take the lead.
With the acceleration of the process of reform and opening up, with the nearly 20 years since China's accession to the WTO, more and more multinational companies have entered China, and in such an era, social Darwinism has become more and more intense, criticizing the cloak of scientific and technological progress and civilization, and the law of the weak preying on the strong still exists, but its style is more gentle and hidden.
One of the current situations in China is that some multinational companies, with their accumulated experience and resources, directly enter and occupy the Chinese market share by acquiring Chinese enterprises. For example, in the mass skincare market, L'Oréal has not found an entry point into mass skincare products. At the time, Little Nurse ranked third, behind Olay and Dabao, with a 5% market share and a brand awareness of up to 90%. As a result, L'Oréal acquired Little Nurse, including the brand, 280,000 sales outlets throughout the country and a production base in Yichang, Hubei Province, and then L'Oréal sold its own popular cosmetics "Garnier" and "Maybelline" through Little Nurse's huge sales network.
In the beer market, for example, foreign capital set off a climax in 2004 to acquire Chinese beer companies, in which Tsingtao Beer was acquired by Budweiser's parent company AB Company for 27% of the shares, and today, Green Beer, China Resources and Harbin Beer have lost control of themselves, leaving one Yanjing, the last national brand still controlled by China. These enterprises that have been operating for many years and have performed well in the domestic market have finally become a pawn of multinational enterprise giants in China and part of their global strategic layout.
In fact, the world is not getting flatter, on the contrary, the world is "accumulating" new bumps and unevennesses. In the face of a more "flat" or uneven world, Chinese enterprises have a long way to go, no matter what, their own tuition fees to pay, we pay tuition today, is for tomorrow's "teacher", the key is to pay tuition at the same time, how to learn as quickly as possible, what should be mastered.
As one Chinese central bank official put it about the U.S.-China trade relationship: "At first, we were afraid of wolves coming; later, we danced with wolves; and in the end, we were going to be wolves." Speaking of wolf, I think of Huawei, the four giants of China's communications industry, Dragon, Datang, ZTE and Huawei, now only Huawei is left alone, from winter to the spring of the northern country, to the attack of the coyote, Huawei's efforts have always made us pay attention to and think.
Therefore, if you look at it with a sense of distress, "The World is Flat" is definitely worth reading.