Friedman, Florida & What's Next

Friedman (2005) was one of the first to articulate the three major globalization movements in history.  His take on Globalization 1 and 2 describing the flattening of countries and companies, respectively, was insightful in the way that it framed the issues covering Globalization 3, the current post 2000 period of history, and its effect on the individual.  Friedman’s The World is Flat describes ten “flatteners” that bring individuals around the world together into one world economy.  He described flatteners such as:

Outsourcing - A company’s ability to split tasks or functions that are then farmed out to another company for completion

Offshoring - The relocation of a company’s manufacturing or production facility to a foreign land, where labor rates (usually) are significantly less

Supply-chaining - Horizontal collaboration among suppliers, retailers and customers, to create value and utilize technology to streamline sales, distribution and shipping operations

Insourcing - Horizontal collaboration where one company worked with other companies to take them global but make them feel local.

Informing - Friedman said that there is no bigger flattener than making the world’s knowledge available to everyone, anytime and anywhere.  He believed that the ability for anyone to use a search engine such as Google to instantly obtain information of any kind is a strategic equalizer, whereby individuals no longer had to rely on libraries, TV, or movies to get the information or end-product they wanted.  To understand the scale, Google is known to process upwards of a billion searches each day.  The major impact is that information is no longer limited by geography, access to repositories of information (universities, for example), or time.  This availability of information transforms individuals into his or her own-supply chain (peddling things such as music, videos and photos).

The Steroids - Friedman anticipated a merging of these flatteners into a flattener on steroids, where the resulting synergy would be transformative, abundant and unpredictable.  Friedman provided very little empirical evidence to support suppositions, intriguing though they are.

Florida (2005) in his The World is Spiky article in the October 2005 Atlantic Monthly concurred with Friedman in general that there was a worldwide coming together of the masses.  However, Florida contended that the masses were coming together in urban centers, or spikes, all around the world.  The reason, he posited, was due to economics and the close proximity of like creative professionals. He supported this contention by illustrating the demographic distribution of intellectual property applications, among other indicators.

New web-based technologies involving smart phones, widgets, gadgets, applications, wikis, social platforms, and other forms of data manipulation and management seem to be the rage now.  How they will affect the world economy in ten years is, if history holds, unknowable.

Applications now are almost always either web-based or web-enabled.  Technologies that were recently created to connect individuals are now being applied, albeit more methodically, to enable government and corporations to reach individuals.

The brilliant Yale Professor David Gelernter anticipates that coming new technologies will form around social data aggregation, life-logging, quantified-self, and digital preservation.  For a graphic example, see below:

References

Florida, R. (2005). The World is Spiky. The Atlantic Monthly, October, 48-51.

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Picador.