The World is Flat: Without Trust, There is No Open Society
In late 2008, I read and gave copies of the book, “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman, to my clients for Christmas. If you get the chance, read this book. A few notable topics from this book are outsourcing versus insourcing, and natural resources vs human resources.
Here’s an article from Time Magazine on how UPS offered “customers… [their] throat to choke when the pressure was on to deliver.” According to Friedman, Insourcing is Flattener #8.
The other topic that caught my interest was India 2.0. To cite the book, “While India certainly had natural resources to mine… with so many mouths to feed, it couldn’t just live off them… So instead India mined the brains of its own people, educating a relatively large slice of its elites in the sciences, engineering, and medicine.” Outsourcing is Flattener #5 on Friedman’s list.
How does this affect marketing? Business processes are streamlined, production are no longer localized, entrepreneurs have resources with little overhead and more consumers purchase confidently online. According to Mr. Thomas L. Friedman, without trust, there will be no openness and a “flattening of the world”. The kind of world we live in today where a mom and pop store can compete with other businesses with little overhead cost; making this world an equal, level playing field for everyone.
