As you may have noticed off to the right, I have moved onto another book after my 'lil 'ole attempt to get through a summer of Faulkner. Though you may think my current selection, NY Times reporter Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, is an equally odd choice.
A book that swirls around the topics of out-sourcing, in-sourcing, open sourcing, off-shoring, supply chains, and work-flow software is not exactly the type of the book you worry about getting sandy on a beach or wet by the pool. But I am plowing right through it!
While I have only read the first 100 pages or so, I have already lost count on the number of times my jaw has dropped open. I like to believe I am fairly "up" on current events and trends, but Friedman fleshes it in fascinating fashion (how's that for some alliteration!)... sure you know something about outsourcing and web browsers... but it is hard not to be stunned by the details and the impact these things have had on world... Friedman purports has changed dramatically in the last 5 years or so (and it is hard to argue otherwise!)... thus the whole concept of this book... technology has leveled the playing field... the world is flattening.
Heck, I'm a product/part of this new flat world. I have been working on my own for about 5-6 years now... something that likely would not have been possible even in the mid-1990s. But technology makes us seem like we are any other worker in high-rise office at a 9-5 job... not bed-headed, bare-foot, with Regis & Kelly on the TV.
Consider this work scenario ... a media company in California wishes to do a customer satisfaction study, they contract the work to a two-person consulting "company" in Virginia, who then sends the phone survey portion to a call-center in Oklahoma and the back-end result-oriented work to a company near Boston, that Boston company is partnered with a 3-person company in Arizona. When the study is completed, Oklahoma emails the data to the Virginia and cc's the folks in Arizona... the Arizona folks send the reports/results back to Virginia... where charts and graphs and recommendations are completed and sent back to the original California client.
Welcome to my flat world. Needless to say, I don't actually meet any of the above parties in person, and often times, I don't even have to talk to any of them!
But this same thing is going on all over the world.
Call about your lost luggage on Delta Airlines and you get a hold of Susie... "Susie" is likely in a crowded call-center in India where she learned how to speak "American" (and perhaps just a cubicle away from "Mike" handling tech support for Dell)...
Call for a reservation on Jet Blue, you will probably be talk to a Mormom housewife working from her Salt Lake City home...
Hiit the McDonald's drive-thru in Illinois, the person on the other end of the speaker box may be in Colorado Springs...
Drop your broken Toshiba PC off at the UPS Store, guess what Toshiba never sees it... it is repaired, and sent back to you, by "Big Brown"...
Hurricane headed for Florida? Wal-Mart computers know to stock their stores with extra beer and Pop-Tarts...
Fascinating stuff, huh? Ok, still not a mindless beach read... but still a very "real" world page-turner.
