Quick Summary: I’m starting a new series on why the social web is not flat and why it’s a good thing.
It has been fashionable for a while now to describe the world as ‘globalized’. Ever since Thomas Friedman’s ode to globalization, ‘The World is Flat’, became a runaway bestseller in 2005, it has also become fashionable to describe the world as ‘flat’. Indians, in particular, have a special fondness for Friedman’s book because Friedman is enamored with the Indian IT industry and the title was derived from a statement by Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys.
While the ‘world is flat’ metaphor has been much abused over the last three years, even Friedman’s original argument (that historical, regional and geographical divisions have become irrelevant in a global marketplace where all companies and countries have a level playing field) is quite exaggerated.
In a series of posts written over the next few weeks, I’ll establish that the world is not truly globalized, but ’semi-globalized’ (as Pankaj Ghemawat describes it in ‘Redefining Global Strategy’) or ‘rough-correlated’ (a term used by Eric Beinhocker in ‘The Origin of Wealth’).
