Submitted to: March 31 2010

Sir Khalid Mumtaz

Submitted by:
Abid Khan

BBA-7(A)

Book Review--- THE WORLD IS

FLAT
This book “The World is Flat” by Tom Freidman acknowledges the Globalization and several
factors that contributed towards its emergence. The book also discusses how Europe can act in
the era of Globalization and also discusses many factors hindering this process.

The author start this book from his visit to India where he was amazed to see how so many
companies especially of America are working in India and providing services back in America.
The book then discusses ten major factors of flattening the world. These ten factors are:

1. The fall of Berlin wall and development of windows operating system- cold war was
infect a war between two economic systems- Capitalist or free economic system and
Communist or closed economic system, and with the fall of Berlin wall, the cold war
ended resulting in the winning of capitalist economic system and opening gates for
globalization. Same did the emergence of IBM PCs and windows operating system,
where now everything could be transformed from hardcopy to softcopy. Phone, Fax and
PC gave everyone the power to digitize the information.

2. WWW (World Wide Web) and Internet browsers- The introduction of world wide web
and internet browsers gave the power of connectivity to millions of people who started
using them for different useful purposes.

3. The development of different set of standard in World Wide Web empowered

organizations all over the world to better workflow and work together towards their goal
achievement.

4. The engineers and programmers started working together over internet using different set
of communication software’s to develop certain software like Wikipedia, Freeware which
will benefit many in the coming ages.

5. Outsourcing- The collaboration of America and India in many fields starting from
digitizing data in the fear of Y2K was a big step towards globalization and consequently
e-commerce grew.

6. Off-shoring- China opening its borders for world in 2001 by joining WTO brought many
organization to start production in China to benefit from cheap labor, lower taxes etc.

7. Supply chaining- Collaboration of many Suppliers, manufactures and Customers all over
the world. Many organizations such as Wal-Mart emerged and became a giant.

8. In-Sourcing- Organizations such as UPS who aside from their core business started
working between supplier and customer as a third party for different purposes. They are
also working towards synchronizing the world.
 9. In-Forming: People have started doing so many things by themselves, as they became
independent, that they are a whole supply chain of themselves.

10. The impact of modern digital communication devices enhanced connectivity and is
playing their part in globalization.

To survive in the ever flattening transformation of infrastructure and education system is the
order of the day for European countries specially America. The education of liberal art is
necessary now with the education of mathematics, medicine and engineering.

There are several problems faced by globalization process which limits from its full potential.
The huge portions of developing countries are still taking no part in the process. Some have less
technical skills and adequate education to benefit from it. There is a fight for natural resources
which is heating up every day and destroying our planet very quickly.