What Does Thomas Friedman Mean By The World Is Flat And Is It True A Decade Later?

hello well this is dr. Dave Maass like talking to you about reciprocity dot-com the e is written with a 3n in this particular video I really want to talk about what does Thomas Friedman actually mean by the world is flat and is it truly true a decade later after he wrote this book so what I'm gonna get into is talk to you about what Thomas Trent Friedman meant and then after that get into some sort of factors and sort of said tell you what has happened since he actually wrote the book and then finally get in - you know maybe possibly reasons why it's not necessarily true today so you know Thomas Friedman he is a remarkable person this fact was the reason why or one of the reasons why I actually chose to do a PhD in strategy so I'm a professor of innovation strategy in entrepreneurship and I initially started investigating what are called Bourne global companies these are ones that are our companies that are actually they are global from when they actually start and it's a really interesting phenomenon there's lots a really cool research that's going on and part of the reason why I was interested in that is because I read Thomas Friedman's book and it was very interested in this whole notion of globalization of where the world was actually going towards so in his book what he was meaning with the world was flat and by the way and kudos to him a remarkable stuff and what he was meaning was that the world is flat in that the competitive marketplace was becoming equal across all domains was becoming easier for people in emerging markets to actually get access to people in developing markets and sell their particular products and then as well for entrepreneurs sort of individual people to sell their products and compete with businesses large corporations a lot more easier right so they can actually come in that sort of way and there's a lot of different factors and why this is the case right so information computing technology things like shipping costs for example the the cargo container really easy to ship things now you know things like actually travel much more easier to travel across nations now it's really safe compared to what it used to be even a decade ago you know there's lots of different things like that in in in Cir specifically things like like Wikipedia right the emergence of new software's and the Internet at that time was just coming online it was becoming a big thing I'm the ability to collaborate really freely using some of these software platforms for example they weren't called platforms at the time but you know platforms like like things like like Gmail at the time was just starting to come out or hotmail at the time was just starting to come out and then the ability to outsource to other countries much more easier and then as well as sort of a reduction in knowledge barriers so what has happened since a decade later didn't was he correct and what he was suggesting and in general he actually was pretty correct in in one he was suggesting which is really cool and fascinating to sort of ride that wave to see some of the things that have happened since then and his predictions were pretty much in line right so now we have software platforms like Facebook makes it really easy to communicate with other people Wikipedia one of the largest software platforms that are available you can get knowledge anybody can get knowledge around the world from Wikipedia and learn stuff on Wikipedia really really easily up work and Alibaba they make the the life of outsourcing really easy you can outsource very very simply and get people from all around the world to do a particular project 99designs is another one like that it's a design website then you can go and you can get different design features or things drawn up from you from people all around the world really easily and then the really cool thing that's happened in the last you know I was specially say in the last seven years is that there's been an entrepreneurial culture that's being accelerated across the world right you're just thinking about the different sort of TV shows that are now popular on side right and in the popular domain right Dragon's Den and things like that or you know there's there's all sorts of entrepreneurial things that that are currently becoming very popular and it's wonderful to see these kind of things however I think in the research generally suggests is that a lot of people are still not taking advantage of the fact that the world is not flat and there are several factors that we know of and that can repeatedly come up that make it sort of difficult to work in this particular world right we are moving towards this economy where the world is becoming increasingly more flat but we have tendencies as human beings and that's really what we're talking about sort of behavioral things to not behave in that sort of way so we have to create software infrastructure and things like that that kind of have to compensate for these tendencies so what is that so the first one that I think is really important that I think Thomas Freeman maybe should have emphasized a little bit more with his story and that we know and in in in its you know it's at the time when he was writing this this was not sort of as readily available this idea wasn't necessarily as sort of big and sort of important within the management literature in any sort of way it's becoming increasingly more important and this is the idea then acquiring knowledge is extremely difficult to do and that once you acquire knowledge that whatever knowledge it is you can actually absorb more knowledge so this is actually called absorb capacity Dan Leventhal and Michael Cohen they they wrote about this years ago I think was 1991 they wrote about this particular topic but it didn't start to really start picking up steam until the 2000s in the academic literature and I think it's starting to become a little bit more popular within soar a popular press and ideas like that so what is it so it just basically means it's really stinking hard to absorb knowledge to think about something and once you absorb that knowledge even though it's a little bit of knowledge that you absorb it makes it easier to absorb other knowledge right so the more that you actually absorb them easier it is to absorb so that's the reason why even though that there's all this information around and even at the time when he was writing about this you had access free access to libraries you could got that information most people within North America and in Western Europe right you had access to free libraries so you can go get all the information you want but most people actually don't take it and take up that opportunity rights just like why wikipedia is online and you know most people are not gonna sit there and read Wikipedia all day right because they have no need to actually read that knowledge and they just don't often don't know what they don't know right so that's the critical thing is that the more you actually learn the more that you absorb the easier it is to learn other stuff and most people just don't do that's really hard to do behaviorally and so physically it's hard to do to absorb this particular knowledge right so that's going to reduce and even at the organization level when we talk about firm-set that is gonna happen as well it's really hard for organizations to absorb knowledge as well the second thing that I think Thomas Freeman maybe downplayed a little bit too much is that there is a role of trust that is extremely important that we often don't talk about with in dealing with people from other places right so it's this whole stranger-danger thing right if you don't if you don't know who that other person is you have a tendency to not actually interact with that other person now this is the reason why geographic proximity still really matters with business the closer you are and this is pretty consistent I don't think I've ever seen a study that has sort of negated this in any sort of way the closer you are to others the more likely you are to learn from those particular people as well as in it it's easier to do business with them right so being in that geographic proximity it's much more easier to do business with those people within that geographic proximity right simply because we have extra trust we have information about them and we see them all the time so we are more likely to interact with them that are close by right and the second thing or the third thing sorry is that I think Thomas Freeman might have overlooked the fact that there is a lot of tacit information tacit knowledge so tacit being sort of the invisible stuff that's hard to acquire that businesses sort of absorb in acquire but it's not easily and readily observable in any sort of way so individual entrepreneurs are going to always have this sort of problem of because they have not been in the system long enough they might not have the support from their larger organization maybe it's just them and they are missing out and some really important tasks and knowledge aspects that only larger organizations actually acquire over time so that's important those three factors are important which make it difficult to actually have this world as flat sort of phenomenon however you know there are software systems that are actively trying to negate this right so Facebook's one of them they're trying to negate this particular problem by making it easier to communicate with others and another one is like Airbnb really cool thing right or you know uber is trying to actively negate these issues with building trust with other people and then trying to build sewer systems and plane to build trust with other peoples but in general it's still a really hard thing to do and there's still a lot to learn going forward about this particular phenomenon I don't think that you know given this world right now Deccan decade later after Thomas Freeman first started talking about this I don't think we're still yet there to where the world is actually flat I think we still have a lot to go the software systems are there the infrastructure is there to make the world flatter and it is flatter it's definitely a lot more flatter than it was a decade ago but we're still not you know perfectly flat in any sort of way and I think you still can't negate that the the issues of dealing locally compared to dealing in a global scale so if you liked this video make sure you give me a thumbs up take care and have a wonderful day bye

Channel: R3ciprocity Team

Views: 5,958

Keywords: r3ciprocity.com, What Does Thomas Friedman Mean By The World Is Flat, thomas friedman the world is flat, thomas friedman, the world is flat, the world is flat thomas friedman, globalization, internationalization, born global companies, born global firm, flat world, what does thomas friedman mean by the world is flat, the world is flat thomas friedman summary

Id: 6s_y6Q9qpAo

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018