World Is Flat

To people’s different perspective the world can be viewed to them as round or flat. The author of The World Is Flat, published by Farrar, Strauss and Girony, Thomas Friedman simply believes the world is flat. In chapter one of this book, he travels across the entire globe to discover how the world is flat to him.

In the book the World Is Flat, Friedman travels to Bangalore, India, where he finds himself surrounded by advertisements of traditionally American businesses. To his surprise he discovers Indian workers who work for these American businesses, speaking American accents and even taking on American names. Infosys’s CEO Nelekani, describes the virtual meetings they can have with people from across the globe. On his journey to Dailin, China he notices this city has become an attractive place for Japanese outsourcing. Friedman here concludes how outsourcing and globalization is occurring in places such as India and China today. In Utah, even the simple task of ordering fast food is outsourced. Friedman is astonished that when placing an order at a McDonald’s drive-thru the order is not taken in the restaurant but a call center in Colorado Springs, 900 miles away.

Friedman travels throughout the world to countries such as Japan, China and back to America. He studies various examples of the business’s outsourcings phenomenon’s and its impacts. Home sourcing and outsourcing are explored as Friedman explains the idea of globalization in three stages. Friedman discusses how 1.0 refers to when Columbus set sail until around the 1800’s. Globalization 2.0 is the second great era, which lasted from 1800 to 2000. Globalization 3.0 is the life we are living today. The size of our world is getting smaller as each point in time we pass. Friedman also states how outsourcing is a negative impact because we are losing jobs to people over seas. Friedman has proved his point of the world being flat by traveling to different parts of the world to witness the effects of globalization and outsourcing.

Thomas Friedman travels across the globe to get the actual facts about outsourcing. Through outsourcing, Friedman believes this is the main cause for our flat world. It appears outsourcing is a problem of global matters because it takes peoples jobs and sends it across seas to a person who will work for less money. Friedman’s theories and ideas do not come from his opinions but rather on actual facts he has discovered on his journey. In chapter one called “While I was Sleeping,” he travels to India to prove why he thinks the world is flat. Friedman visits a company called Infosys. Infosys is an information technology industry. The company itself writes software programs to American and European companies. One can see here the effect globalization has to even the remote countries of the world. Friedman says, “Security is tight, cameras monitor the doors…,”(6) because he sees how globalization has migrated to parts of India. An example of outsourcing he was able to see was when he viewed the backroom how customer calls is routed all across the world. This is one use of outsourcing that this particular company uses. In his visit, Friedman stumbles across into the global conference center. Here, they have forty digital screens that representatives from all over the world can communicate. Nilekani, the CEO of the Infosys, said “We could be sitting with somebody from New York, London, and Boston…that’s globalization,” (6). This expresses how fast technology is moving and how big globalization plays a factor in businesses today. Nilekani also says “Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,” (6) this proves Friedman’s idea of how popular outsourcing is being used. It is at this moment where we see outsourcing as a bad thing because as more companies begin to utilize this technique the fewer jobs our generation has to keep.

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