Much as I dislike air travel (now that the ‘improved’ security measures have made it such a miserable, demeaning experience), the long intercontinental flights do have one advantage: I get to read for eight hours straight.
On a recent trip back to Blightly, I finally finished reading Steven Thomas Friedmann’s The World Is Flat Release 2.0 (that’s “Second Edition” to the incognoscenti). This was recommended to me by a colleague, and although I usually eschew such advice or end up regretting not doing so, this one was actually a pretty good read. The book is basically a treatise on the globalization of everything – especially as it relates to offshoring, outsourcing, and the general movement of work to low-cost countries. I think just about everyone is aware these days that such activities are taking place, but the depth and breadth of such activities outlined by Friedmann is truly frightening. The more I read the book, the more scared I became, as it began to dawn on me that no-one is safe. (In fact, I found the book more scary than 28 Weeks Later, which was the in-flight movie on the outbound flight.) The more I read, the more I thought: “My god, I need to do something to differentiate myself as a value-add resource, right now“.
But then maybe I’m just being overly sensitive. Thinking about it, I’m actually a part of the flat world already. My department is spread between the United States, Belgium, England, Germany, and France. My organization expands to take in business support centers in Guatemala and Bangkok. And then much of our coding work is now done in Brazil, Budapest, and Prague. We no longer have meetings – we have TeleCons, and I’ve never met half of the people I work with on a daily basis. Nor my second-line manager, despite her paying my wages for the past year. I used to do this job from Brussels, in Belgium. I now do exactly the same thing from Houston, Texas, because I’d rather be here than there. So one could argue that I’m already a product of the flat world.
That’s not to say I’m ‘safe’… I’m painfully aware that I’m not the cheapest source of labor for the company. And the company does tend to think in terms of cost per body, not (skill) value for money. Fortunately, as a professional writer, my primary skills are communication (and specifically written communication), and these skills are difficult to efficiently move offshore. In fact half the reason I have a job is because the communication skills of the outsourced staff in (for example) Budapest and Curitiba are woefully inadequate, requiring me to fix up (or ‘Dirkify’ as one colleague has it) anything that they do produce.
Friedmann does a reasonable job of explaining how the world got to be flat, and what this means to the West – although it’s pitched more at business owners than regular worker bees like myself. That said, The World Is Flat is littered with some great examples from ‘the flat world’, that will really open your eyes to just how much things have changed. My personal favorite is a group of McDonald’s drive-through franchises in Texas where the person taking the orders for all of the ‘restaurants’ is sat in an office somewhere (or at home) and not on site at any of the restaurants. You can imagine that it can’t be long before even this is outsourced to India. It’s not like there’d be any more of a language problem than my English accent already gives them. Typical exchange: “Can I get a strawberry shake, please?”. “OK, so that’s one Happy Meal with diet coke, right?”…
I do have a couple of issues with the book. The first is with Friedmann’s constant self-aggrandizement: “I was in India talking to the CEO of Wipro…”, “…my good friend Ambassador xxx..”, “At a talk I gave to…”, “In my book The Lexus and the Olive Tree…”, etc., etc.  The second is with Friedmann’s propensity for inventing his own vernacular to describe things in “the flat world”. It’s as if he and Don Tapscott, author if Wikinomics (there he goes!) are in competition to see who can get the most new buzzwords into common usage! Thus, Friedman gives us homesourcing, horizontalization, in-forming, technological determinism, globalution, and of course flatism. All of which could be described perfectly well using Plain English, had Friedmann not been so determined to secure his place in modern history (as William Gibson did with cyberpunk).
These few niggles aside, The World is Flat does provide an interesting read, as well as a swift kick in the pants to anyone who is still naive enough to think that there’s such a thing as job security these days. Me, I’m looking to monetize my differentiating competencies through homesourcing and virtualizing my flatist nature, in a bid to bring Dirkification to the global informosphere…
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