Book Report Segment #3 - The World Is Flat?

The next section of the book deals with chapters 3 through 7. Chapter 3 starts with what Friedman calls the triple convergence. He classifies this as the coming together of three specific things that allowed the most recent globalization to flourish. The first convergence is considered to be the culmination of the ten flatteners. This is called one of the convergences because of the importance it had on global collaborations. It took time for these flatteners to all come together and combine themselves into the global network that they are now. The second convergence includes the new business software that was invented and how that by adapting that software altered business practices. The convergence of these new practices with the global world will take time to become universal and fully implemented in relations. Friedman labels the third convergence as the most critical to global economics and politics. The main idea that makes this third convergence work is horizontal collaboration. Never before were so many people able to connect and compete with their thoughts and ideas. Now with the establishment of the internet highways and software that could speak back and forth people who weren't able to connect before now had the access and ability to input. The biggest new player to the playing field in recent years has been India. India has led the way in developing to fit into the global economy, adapting to the culture of business in the playing field and a new generation has risen which is labeled as the zippies. After moving away from a government of socialism, India's next generation pushed itself into the global information market. The zippies are defined as the young adults with the strive and "zip" to work towards a destination not a destiny and having the mindset to succeed. India isn't concerned with being on the receiving end of the criticism by Americans about jobs being outsourced to there and they believe that Americans shouldn't be either. They believe we should focus on the raising our bar and continue innovating or we will be left behind. China has its own set of zippies that are striving to be better and better. Bill Gates said something in this section that really got me thinking. He made the point that with the world being more flat now there was a much better chance for raw genius talent to succeed. It is no longer enough to just be average and born in a well developed area because right beneath our eyes the number of well developed places is ever increasing. Friedman makes it important to note that this triple convergence that has taken place over the last 25 years is only the warm-up and that what's in store for the future will blow all of this right out of the water. These convergences move us to a new reality which will take the world by storm and that is the sorting out of companies and communities now that they have the means to communicate and collaborate no matter where they set up shop. Foreign companies have done a good job at diversifying their locations of business so that they can succeed in the flat world but on the other hand, America has not positioned itself in good terms to succeed in the flat world. The old way the vertical world where companies commanded and controlled the global market is now being overtaken by the horizontal world where it is now crucial to collaborate and connect in order to be a contender in the global market. Everything will have to be sorted out to determine who owns what, and where everyone stands within that. The next section looks at how Americans are affected by the likings of this flat world. With China and India entering the global markets, Americans have seen an increase in unemployment. Wipro president, Vivek Paul said it best when he compared the connection of these two powers to the global market. He said that the first thing we see is the influx of capacity, followed by an increase of unemployment elsewhere. The capital is soon reallocated though and in the end everyone will benefit. Friedman states that instead of cutting ties with the “railroad” we should embrace it, and improve on the tools the country needs in order to have its share of the capital. He then points to the broad groups of people that will be necessary to make our economy stand tall with the world. He lists them as the great collaborators, synthesizers, explainers, leveragers, adapters, green people, math lovers, and localizers. He makes it clear that these are categories that which a person may full under more than one and that there will be more and more developing along the way. Learning how to fall into as many categories as you can is the key to making yourself more adaptable to succeed in this flat world. Friedman then turns his focus to education and the competition of education. The question arises in the flat world as to what course of education is most needed in order to survive. The answer isn’t clear cut and, as seen throughout different cultures, can be interpreted in many different ways. The most important is to learn how to learn. By learning how to learn you can be more adaptable to change because you have the knowledge to go out and better yourself and constantly absorb new information. Navigation is also a key because the internet is a vast place and without proper knowledge of reliable sources or validated information we could come up wrong on many topics. Friedman also spends some time on the passion and curiosity quotients. He puts so much into these numbers because he feels that these provide you with the most amount of difference. This makes you stand out, and by having these tools; you have a much better shot of solving problems and succeeding in the flat world. The flat world puts a lot more into the horizontal passing of information and along with that we must have the creativity and brain power to interpret and improve in order to flourish. We have to mold our students and younger generations to have all these tools to succeed by pushing the importance of them through their secondary years and making the tools key to admission and success in college/real world. We have the country; we just need the willingness of the people and the strength of their minds to adapt to the new world. We have done it before and we need to do it again. The world is changing and we cannot be stubborn to think that we can just cruise through it. We must change our ways of learning, our abilities as people, and fight to succeed. 

Culture Socialization

The paradox article provided us with seven steps to socialization. Companies socialize so that things are done the way that they wasn't them done within their organization which is perfectly understandable. But it's almost like brainwash. In college your given the general way of how to solve problems that are related to your field. Then once you go out into the real world the culture changes and the company wants to instill in you the wills to win so to say and in order to keep their reputation they must breed you into the bread winner they need. Kinda demeaning if you think about it. Sort of like saying the way you work isn't working for us and no matter how successful you aim to be you must do it within these parameters whether they are limiting or not. But on the other side I guess we have been socialized our whole life so this time it shouldn't be any different. We aren't kids anymore and now I see the reality of the socialization and I'm not sure if I am really to fond of it. Success involves compromise so I suppose I will have to succumb to it at some point.

Employee Uniforms

From our discussion in class I felt like everything about the uniforms effect on the employees was true. It does make you feel degraded wearing a cheap uniform. So the new uniform probably does help to boost morale. One point that I would like to add relates to the topic of pressure. With the old smock, the words "How may I help you?" are emblazoned right on it. This adds pressure to the employee to help the customer because their uniform strictly labels them to do that. With the new uniform that pressure is alleviated because the words are gone so now the employees can walk through the stores and blend in more than they have in the past. This puts the responsibility of reaching out to customers in the hands of the employees which from the Walmart employees I've seen isn't the best idea to do.

The Joys of Researching

From our class in the Library Lab we got the usual lecture on searching the internet. Usually I go at it as to just find what I need as easily as possible. This time though I looked at it differently and I think a great deal of that is credited from the book I’m reading for my book report, “The World Is Flat”.

We think about the internet and it’s such a large database of information, babble, and nonsense. Every time I have to do research for a paper I run into the issue of sifting the meaningful from the meaningless. My book talks about the internet and how with so much information in one place the world is a much more level playing field because more and more people can access it. The beauty of the internet is also its biggest problem, how to access what you need and what you need alone. This is one of things that I got out of my book so far is that in order for the world to continue to flatten, there needs to be ways of searching the internet and finding what you need from a reliable source, say a scholarly journal for instance.

Enter Aaron Dobbs, many see him as a simple librarian but, after connecting the lessons in my book to him, I see him as a flattener of our world. Look at what he did just for our class. He set up a site where we could access certain databases of information narrowed down to the business sector. Every angle we needed to hit was readily available by the simple click of a tab or link on his site which saves me a substantial amount of time. He had database after database where the outside topics of “nonsense” could be eliminated from our search. This made searching the internet much less frustrating and time could be made more efficient by getting to the meat of the information out there. The key to flattening the world is to make information easily and efficiently accessible and at the same time get only the information you are looking for.

So, thanks to the database companies and Aaron Dobbs for being together responsible for the flattening of the world and making the internet a much more user friendly place to conduct research. I mean without these innovators we’d still be searching through pages and pages on Google looking for “scholarly journals”. 

Decision-Making Biases

From the quiz that we were given in class we were introduced to certain biases that lead us to forming decisions. The first two questions I got right. I’m not saying I understood the bias behind that questions as I read them but I saw the five companies I knew and thought I know them all but none from the other group so I figured it was to trick us and I picked the ones I didn’t know. As with question 2 I went at it the same way. The information fit a stereotype very closely so I went with the opposite answer. Then problem 3 came and I fell into the ease of recall bias without even thinking about it. In problem 4 as we can’t 100% determine the correct answer to the # of words it’s obvious that there can’t be less words in 4b than 4a.

Anyway I found it interesting how tough it is to make decisions without bias. It’s like society hands us the wrong tools for life. Between stereotypes, recall, past experiences, and accessibility it’s easy to see how these can get in the way of making correct decisions or jumping to the “easiest” answer based on the things I mentioned. The real test of leadership and decision making I guess is to how well you can eliminate these biases and come to the straight, rational, correct answer. Sticking to probabilities, means, and avoiding conjunction fallacies all help to come to these rational decisions. Knowledge is key: knowing of these biases helps you to avoid them or at least keep an eye out for them.

As I’m sure the biases that are instilled in us help in some ways throughout our lives I feel we should be weary of them in the business world.

Book Report Segment #2 - The World Is Flat?

In this next section of the book Freidman describes his 10 reasons that the world is flattened. The first flattener he attributes to is the falling of the Berlin Wall. He sees the wall as a roadblock in connecting the world and that the wall separated the communist from the capitalists. As the wall falls down this opens up the roadways and ground routes for the information highway to expand. This now takes the world from being to separate spheres and turns it into a whole body reaching toward a connection. The next flattener he mentions is the invention of the WWW and Netscape. He sees the World Wide Web as a great innovation but something that was not easily operable by the common person. It wasn’t until Netscape came along and made the internet more user friendly that people started to latch onto it and it began to grow. This invention allowed anyone and everyone to put their opinions and ideas on the internet for anyone and everyone to see. This flattened the world because people could now pass information easier than ever. This, though, was only the beginning. The next flattener is the invention of work flow software and its effect on the internet. It created a commonality of standards that made it easier to pass information to one another. The standards allowed companies to change their focus from making their product singular to opening up the power of their products because quality was now more important due to the playing field being so very similar. The fourth flattener deals with the topic of uploading the reasons for it flattening the world. This trend allowed everyone to be producers of software and information rather than just consumers. It left people striving to develop new and advanced things and leveled out the world. Not only were the technology companies developing software and websites but now the simple user could develop his or her own sites/software that they could upload to the internet for other users to see and operate. Freidman brings up the topic of community developed software which commonly gets the name open source community. This is fairly complicated to understand but it is generally just the programming instructions that make the software run.  This offered competition to the major corporations to always produce the best quality software but also to provide it at a reasonable price. Friedman lays the most room for more flattening if that makes sense on uploading. It has the most room to succeed or be disruptive. Things such as blogging and Wikipedia are often user opinion and even in our course of research Wikipedia cannot be trusted but I feel like it kind of goes along with what Dr. Goates said in class about the theory of multiple people laying out information will be right in the long run. I see how uploading can turn bad, but I feel as if with the proper education and adoption and simple overlooking ethics we can keep uploading a positive thing for people to do. Flattener number five is outsourcing. Outsourcing has flattened our world because business people see that they can make more profits by taking the less challenging work to cheaper labor countries. This in turn provides and opportunity for that country to become more educated and therefore increase their stance in the global economy. Look at India and how they have developed and China too. These countries are and will overtake the US and Europe because of their rapid increase in education. By outsourcing labor positions elsewhere we have flattened the world because with the opportunity to learn comes an economic boost. The next flattener is off shoring which is different from outsourcing because it isn’t just contracting out a single part of your business it is actually taking your whole business elsewhere.  He contributes the flattening that has occurred from this to the entrance of China to the WTO. Ever since then every other country has had to work faster and faster to keep up with the development that China was seeing. The scary thing is that China just isn’t cheaper from the labor standpoint but their innovation and technologies have seen steady improvements over the past decade or so which is something the US and Europe need to be aware of. The seventh flattener deals with supply chaining and how that has flattened the world. The reason that this is such a flattener is because when a company takes advantage of a supplier on a global level they are interconnecting the world in a way that hasn’t been seen before. The goal of low cost makes this so important because companies are now looking anywhere they can in order to get a better deal than their competitor thus creating a flattened world. Flatteners eight and nine are insourcing and informing. These both go a long way as to making the world a flatter place. As far as insourcing goes the leader here is UPS. They have gone from merely delivering packages to now setting up complete supply chain systems for companies all over the world and bringing together companies all across the world like never before. UPS helps small companies broaden their reach because UPS has the means to deliver and receive from anywhere and everywhere. I find this fascinating because it allows the world to flatten more and more due to an ever increasing number of companies reaching globally thanks to UPS’s help. Informing relates to Google and Yahoo mainly. The two major search engines, they allow anyone with internet access the ability to find anything they’re looking for by simply typing it into the box. This has flattened the world mainly because so much information is readily accessible whenever wherever by whoever. The last flattener is simply the new advances and the shrinking and accessibility of the technology. Inventions such as the sd card, iphone, tablet, laptop, etc. have all provided more access to the information available on the internet. The fact that everything I need is available on my smart phone makes all the difference. For the world to be flat the accessibility has to be there and this is the recent push we have seen between competitors today.

Integrative Negotiation

The topic of integrative negotiation intrigued me in class. I thought about what it takes to come to an integrative decision. I think its something that you develop over time with a party as your relationship deepens. I don't believe that you jump to working out a negotiation in an integrative way right out of the gate because this leaves you vulnerable. If the other party doesn't reveal their true intentions you run the risk of being manipulated into a decision not best for yourself. 

It kinda plays off human nature. Competition is everywhere in our world and for two random, stranger parties to decide on an integrative decision takes a great set of morals and ethics. Competition usually prevails in a first time negotiation because the parties feel the need to win, unknowing that both parties can "win".

If two parties come to an integrative decision together I believe that that has to go a long way in developing a long term relationship in dealing with that party.