Thomas Friedman has a vision for the final edition of The World is Flat: anybody will be able to update it.
“It’s been suggested to me that we actually turn the book into an open-source product. Just put it up on the web like Wikipedia [the collaborative online encyclopedia] and let people add to it,” says the New York Times columnist, who is working on the second edition of his bestseller on globalisation.
It is a vision that will turn his publishers – Penguin/Allen Lane in the UK and Farrar Straus Giroux in the US – pale with anxiety about the copyright implications, not to mention the risk that opponents of the book or its message about the benefits of globalisation will try to hijack the wiki edition. But it is a vision that is perfectly in tune with the picture of a globalised and interconnected world that Mr Friedman outlines.
A version of the book that can be constantly updated may also be the only way to guarantee that it remains current. The book’s premise is that, at the beginning of this century, the world entered a new phase of globalisation, based on disruptive social, political and technological events (“flatteners”, as Mr Friedman calls them) during the latter part of the 20th century.
In this flatter world, companies and individuals will be able to collaborate and compete more successfully, whatever their size and wherever they are. Those that fail to adapt will suffer, he says.
Friedman speaks
Andrew Hill, the FT’s Financial Editor, interviewed Thomas Friedman about the evolution of his ideas since publication of the book and his plans for the future. This is an edited transcript of the interview.
Mr Friedman – interviewed via mobile phone in Dallas, where he is collecting material for the second edition from EDS, the systems integration company – says the evolution towards an interconnected, flatter world has accelerated since the book was completed nearly a year ago.
This month, for instance, the audio version of The World is Flat became the top-selling podcast album on Apple’s iTunes audio downloading site, says the author.
“That got me enormous juice with my teenage daughters. But what’s really interesting is that when I started this book in March 2004, podcasting didn’t exist.
“And what’s even more interesting to me is: who invented podcasting? Nobody. It was an application that just emerged from the network.”
Mr Friedman’s evident passion for his topic was one reason why a distinguished panel of judges last week chose The World is Flat as the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year.
When assessing the shortlist of six titles, Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s president and chief operating officer, said the book had made him “want to take my kids out of school [in the US] and put them into school in China or India”.
“It’s hard to think of another book that’s having such an enormous impact,” said another panellist, Jeffrey Garten, business professor at Yale School of Management, during the final judging session.
Yet, although he is grateful for the award and the £30,000 ($51,000) prize, Mr Friedman insists he did not set out to write a “business book”. It annoys him that some have criticised him for making chief executives “the main actors in this drama of global affairs”.
Business people are prominent in the book, he says, because they and their companies are among the principal forces driving the kind of technological progress that he describes. But he insists that the rapid development of new and cheaper technology will have a much broader impact and that it puts new tools in the hands of people well beyond the business world.
“I know people in the intelligence world are using it. I know people in our armed forces are using it. I really saw myself as writing a book on foreign policy. What is the new platform that foreign policy is on? To understand that platform, you’ve got to understand the technology of it, you’ve got to understand the economics of it and you also have to understand who is driving it forward, because it’s not static,” he says.
Mr Friedman’s book has its critics. Writing in the FT, Martin Wolf called it a “bad, good book” and attacked its flamboyant style and mixed metaphors, while recognising its enormous energy.
It is not a comfortable read for anyone with a 20th-century view of how the world works. In the chapter “This is not a test”, Mr Friedman notes that, in the face of forces he describes, the developed world – the US, specifically – cannot “get by doing things the way we’ve been doing them”.
Is there a risk, however, that business leaders and policymakers will simply be paralysed into inaction by the sheer pace and complexity of the developments that he describes? Mr Friedman thinks not. The rapid evolution over the past year of what is known as “Web 2.0” – a flowering of internet companies and strategies, based on the growing availability of cheap or free software online – has made it possible for budding entrepreneurs and big companies to experiment with new strategies without having to “bet the firm”, he says.
“This platform has on it so much free software that I can start things much more cheaply. That’s what’s so cool about it: you don’t need this huge amount of capital any more,” he says. He cites The New York Times’s online initiative with TimesSelect – which requires readers to pay for access to articles by Mr Friedman himself and other columnists – as an example of the kind of experiment that entrepreneurs should now conduct. Mr Friedman says he was “very ambivalent” when the idea of charging for access to his work was first raised: “I understand we’re caught between a paper platform and a digital platform. But at the same time, I also knew that once we did this it was surely going to limit the scope and reach of all the columnists.”
He concluded, however, that: “You can test this out and do focus groups as much as you want but you’re never going to know [if it works] until you try it.”
The World is Flat could propel Mr Friedman into the ranks of management gurus – a sort of Tom Peters for the 21st century. But it is a role he says he will resist.
“I wrote this book so I would have a lens on how to understand the world and so I could be a foreign affairs columnist,” he says.
The World is Flat is not just a paean to the globalisation of business, he points out. In it, the writer describes how the same tools that have allowed Dell of the US to build a global supply chain for computers allowed Osama bin Laden to build a global supply chain for terror attacks.
“What I discovered is that if you don’t understand these kinds of systems, if you don’t understand what companies are doing, what platform they’re working on, you’re not only missing the business world, you’re also missing the terrorism world,” Mr Friedman says.
“I’m thrilled this is a business book award and I’m thrilled that people in the business community value [the book],” he says. But he adds: “I’d like to think this book could win the best book on terrorism award – you know what I mean?”
FRIEDMAN IN BRIEF
■ The world has entered a deeper phase of globalisation since 2000, sparked by disruptive political and social events
■ This means large and small companies can collaborate and compete more easily across borders
■ A new generation of companies is flourishing on the internet, thanks to cheap or free software
■ The “flatter” world benefits the supply chains of companies such as Dell, the computer make, but also terrorist networks such as that of Osama bin Laden.
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century, by Thomas L. Friedman (Penguin/Allen Lane; Farrar Straus Giroux)
For a full transcript of the interview with Thomas Friedman, video features and details of the other finalists, go to www.ft.com/bookaward
