The World Is Flat

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Instead of complaining about outsourcing, said Rajesh, Americans and Western Europeans would “be better off thinking about how you can raise your bar and raise yourselves into doing something better. Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans whining—we have never seen that before. People like me have learned a lot from Americans. We have learned to become a little more aggressive in the way we market ourselves, which is something we would not have done given our typical British background.”

  So what is your overall message? I asked Rajesh, before leaving with my head spinning.

  p. 191 “My message is that what’s happening now is just the tip of the iceberg . . . What is really necessary is for everybody to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental shift that is happening in the way people are going to do business. And everyone is going to have to improve themselves and be able to compete. It is just going to be one global market. Look, we just made [baseball] caps for Dhruva to give away. They came from Sri Lanka.”

  Not from a factory in South Bangalore? I asked.

  “Not from South Bangalore,” said Rajesh, “even though Bangalore is one of the export hubs for garments. Among the three or four caps we got quotations for, this [Sri Lankan one] was the best in terms of quality and the right price, and we thought the finish was great.

  “This is the situation you are going to see moving forward,” Rajesh concluded. “If you are seeing all this energy coming out of Indians, it’s because we have been underdogs and we have that drive to kind of achieve and to get there . . . India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule.”

  Rule whom? I asked.

  Rajesh laughed at his own choice of words. “It’s not about ruling anybody. That’s the point. There is nobody to rule anymore. It’s about how you can create a great opportunity for yourself and hold on to that or keep creating new opportunities where you can thrive. I think today that rule is about efficiency, it’s about collaboration and it is about competitiveness and it is about being a player. It is about staying sharp and being in the game . . . The world is a football field now and you’ve got to be sharp to be on the team which plays on that field. If you’re not good enough, you’re going to be sitting and watching the game. That’s all.”

  How Do You Say “Zippie” in Chinese?

  As in Bangalore ten years ago, the best place to meet zippies in Beijing today is in the line at the consular section of the U.S. embassy. In Beijing in the summer of 2004, I discovered that the quest by Chinese p. 192 students for visas to study or work in America was so intense that it had spawned dedicated Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swapped stories about which arguments worked best with which U.S. embassy consular officials. They even gave the U.S. diplomats names like “Amazon Goddess,” “Too Tall Baldy,” and “Handsome Guy.” Just how intensely Chinese students strategize over the Internet was revealed, U.S. embassy officials told me, when one day a rookie U.S. consular official had student after student come before him with the same line that some chat room had suggested would work for getting a visa: “I want to go to America to become a famous professor.”

  After hearing this all day, the U.S. official was suddenly surprised to get one student who came before him and pronounced, “My mother has an artificial limb and I want to go to America to learn how to build a better artificial limb for her.” The official was so relieved to hear a new line that he told the young man, “You know, this is the best story I’ve heard all day. I really salute you. I’m going to give you a visa.”

  You guessed it.

  The next day, a bunch of students showed up at the embassy saying they wanted a visa to go to America to learn how to build better artificial limbs for their mothers.

  Talking to these U.S. embassy officials in Beijing, who are the gatekeepers for these visas, it quickly became apparent to me that they had mixed feelings about the process. On the one hand, they were pleased that so many Chinese wanted to come study and work in America. On the other hand, they wanted to warn American kids: Do you realize what is coming your way? As one U.S. embassy official in Beijing said to me, “What I see happening [in China] is what has been going on for the last several decades in the rest of Asia—the tech booms, the tremendous energy of the people. I saw it elsewhere, but now it is happening here.”

  I was visiting Yale in the spring of 2004. As I was strolling through the central quad, near the statue of Elihu Yale, two Chinese-speaking tours came through, with Chinese tourists of all ages. Chinese have started to tour the world in large numbers, and as China continues to develop toward a more open society, it is quite likely that Chinese leisure tourists will alter the whole world-tourism industry.

  p. 193 But Chinese are not visiting Yale just to admire the ivy. Consider these statistics from Yale’s admissions office. The fall 1985 class had 71 graduate and undergraduate students from China and 1 from the Soviet Union. The fall 2003 class had 297 Chinese graduate and undergraduate students and 23 Russians. Yale’s total international student contingent went from 836 in the fall of 1985 to 1,775 in the fall of 2003. Applications from Chinese and Russian high school students to attend Yale as undergraduates have gone from a total of 40 Chinese for the class of 2001 to 276 for the class of 2008, and 18 Russians for the class of 2001 to 30 for the class of 2008. In 1999, Yiting Liu, a schoolgirl from Chengdu, China, got accepted to Harvard on a full scholarship. Her parents then wrote a build-your-own handbook about how they managed to prepare their daughter to get accepted to Harvard. The book, in Chinese, titled Harvard Girl Yiting Liu, offered “scientifically proven methods” to get your Chinese kid into Harvard. The book became a runaway best seller in China. By 2003 it had sold some 3 million copies and spawned more than a dozen copycat books about how to get your kid into Columbia, Oxford, or Cambridge.

  While many Chinese aspire to go to Harvard and Yale, they aren’t just waiting around to get into an American university. They are also trying to build their own at home. In 2004, I was a speaker for the 150th anniversary of Washington University in St. Louis, a school noted for its strength in science and engineering. Mark Wrighton, the university’s thoughtful chancellor, and I were chatting before the ceremony. He mentioned in passing that in the spring of 2001 he had been invited (along with many other foreign and American academic leaders) to Tsinghua University in Beijing, one of the finest in China, to participate in the celebration of its ninetieth anniversary. He said the invitation left him scratching his head at first: Why would any university celebrate its ninetieth anniversary—not its hundredth?

  “Perhaps a Chinese tradition?” Wrighton asked himself. When he arrived at Tsinghua, though, he learned the answer. The Chinese had brought academics from all over the world to Tsinghua—more than ten thousand people attended the ceremony—in order to make the declaration “that at the one hundredth anniversary Tsinghua University would p. 194 be among the world’s premier universities,” Wrighton later explained to me in an e-mail. “The event involved all of the leaders of the Chinese government, from the Mayor of Beijing to the head of state. Each expressed the conviction that an investment in the university to support its development as one of the world’s great universities within ten years would be a rewarding one. With Tsinghua University already regarded as one of the leading universities in China, focused on science and technology, it was evident that there is a seriousness of purpose in striving for a world leadership position in [all the areas involved] in spawning technological innovation.”

  And as a result of China’s drive to succeed, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates argued to me, the “ovarian lottery” has changed—as has the whole relationship between geography and talent. Thirty years ago, he said, if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the world has gone flat, Gates sai
d, and so many people can now plug and play from anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.

  “Now,” he said, “I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.”

  That’s what happens when the Berlin Wall turns into the Berlin mall and 3 billion people converge with all these new tools for collaboration. “We’re going to tap into the energy and talent of five times as many people as we did before,” said Gates.

  From Russia with Love

  I didn’t get a chance to visit Russia and interview Russian zippies for this book, but I did the next best thing. I asked my friend Thomas R. Pickering, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and now a top international relations executive with Boeing, to explain a new development p. 195 I had heard about: that Boeing was using Russian engineers and scientists, who once worked on MiGs, to help design its next generation of passenger planes.

  Pickering unraveled the story for me. Beginning in 1991, Boeing started assigning out work to Russian scientists to take advantage of their expertise in aerodynamic problems and new aviation alloys. In 1998, Boeing decided to take this a step further and open an aeronautical engineering design office in Moscow. Boeing located the office in the twelve-story Moscow tower that McDonald’s built with all the rubles it made from selling Big Macs in Moscow before the end of communism—money that McDonald’s had pledged not to take out of the country.

  Seven years later, said Pickering, “we now have eight hundred Russian engineers and scientists working for us and we’re going up to at least one thousand and maybe, over time, to fifteen hundred.” The way it works, he explained, is that Boeing contracts with different Russian aircraft companies—companies that were famous in the Cold War for making warplanes, companies with names like Ilyushin, Tupolev, and Sukhoi—and they provide the engineers-to-order for Boeing’s different projects. Using French-made airplane design software, the Russian engineers collaborate with their colleagues at Boeing America—in both Seattle and Wichita, Kansas—in computer-aided airplane designs. Boeing has set up a twenty-four-hour workday. It consists of two shifts in Moscow and one shift in America. Using fiber-optic cables, advanced compression technologies, and aeronautical work flow software, “they just pass their designs back and forth from Moscow to America,” Pickering said. There are videoconferencing facilities on every floor of Boeing’s Moscow office, so the engineers don’t have to rely on e-mail when they have a problem to solve with their American counterparts. They can have a face-to-face conversation.

  Boeing started outsourcing airplane design work to Moscow as an experiment, a sideline; but today, with a shortage of aeronautical engineers in America, it is a necessity. Boeing’s ability to blend these lower-cost Russian engineers with higher-cost, more advanced American design teams is enabling Boeing to compete head-to-head with its archrival, p. 196 Airbus Industries, which is subsidized by a consortium of European governments and is using Russian talent as well. A U.S. aeronautical engineer costs $120 per design hour; a Russian costs about one-third of that.

  But the outsourcees are also outsourcers. The Russian engineers have outsourced elements of their work for Boeing to Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore, which specializes in digitizing airplane designs so as to make them easier to manufacture. But this isn’t the half of it. In the old days, explained Pickering, Boeing would say to its Japanese subcontractors, “We will send you the plans for the wings of the 777. We will let you make some of them and then we will count on you buying the whole airplanes from us. It’s a win-win.”

  Today Boeing says to the giant Japanese industrial company Mitsubishi, “Here are the general parameters for the wings of the new 7E7. You design the finished product and build it.” But Japanese engineers are very expensive. So what happens? Mitsubishi outsources elements of the outsourced 7E7 wing to the same Russian engineers Boeing is using for other parts of the plane. Meanwhile, some of these Russian engineers and scientists are leaving the big Russian airplane companies, setting up their own firms, and Boeing is considering buying shares in some of these start-ups to have reserve engineering capacity.

  All of this global sourcing is for the purpose of designing and building planes faster and cheaper, so that Boeing can use its cash to keep innovating for the next generation and survive the withering competition from Airbus. Thanks to the triple convergence, it now takes Boeing eleven days to build a 737, down from twenty-eight days just a few years ago. Boeing will build its next generation of planes in three days, because all the parts are being computer-designed for assembly, and Boeing’s global supply chain will enable it to move parts from one facility to another just in time.

  To make sure that it is getting the best deals on its parts and other supplies, Boeing now runs regular “reverse auctions,” in which companies bid down against each other rather than bid up against each other. They bid for contracts on everything from toilet paper for the Boeing factories to nuts and bolts—the off-the-shelf commodity parts—for Boeing’s supply chain. Boeing will announce an auction for a stated time on a specially designed Internet site. It will begin the auction for each supply p. 197 item at what it considers a fair price. Then it will just sit back and watch how far each supplier wants to undercut the others to win Boeing’s business. Bidders are prequalified by Boeing, and everyone can see everyone else’s bids as they are submitted.

  “You can really see the pressures of the marketplace and how they work,” said Pickering. “It’s like watching a horse race.”

  The Other Triple Convergence

  I once heard Bill Bradley tell a story about a high-society woman from Boston who goes to San Francisco for the first time. When she comes home and is asked by a friend how she liked it, she says, “Not very much—it’s too far from the ocean.”

  The perspective and predispositions that you carry around in your head are very important in shaping what you see and what you don’t see. That helps to explain why a lot of people missed the triple convergence. Their heads were completely somewhere else—even though it was happening right before their eyes. Three other things—another convergence—came together to create this smoke screen.

  The first was the dot-com bust, which began in March 2001. As I said earlier, many people wrongly equated the dot-com boom with globalization. So when the dot-com boom went bust, and so many dot-coms (and the firms that supported them) imploded, these same people assumed that globalization was imploding as well. The sudden flameout of dogfood.com and ten other Web sites offering to deliver ten pounds of puppy chow to your door in thirty minutes was supposed to be proof that globalization and the IT revolution were all sizzle and no beef.

  This was pure foolishness. Those who thought that globalization was the same thing as the dot-com boom and that the dot-com bust marked the end of globalization could not have been more wrong. To say it again, the dot-com bust actually drove globalization into hypermode by forcing companies to outsource and offshore more and more functions in order to save on scarce capital. This was a key factor in laying the groundwork for p. 198 Globalization 3.0. Between the dot-com bust and today, Google went from processing roughly 150 million searches per day to roughly one billion searches per day, with only a third coming from inside the United States. As its auction model caught on worldwide, eBay went from twelve hundred employees in early 2000 to sixty-three hundred by 2004, all in the period when globalization was supposed to be “over.” Between 2000 and 2004, total global Internet usage grew 125 percent, including 186 percent in Africa, 209 percent in Latin America, 124 percent in Europe, and 105 percent in North America, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Yes, globalization sure ended, all right.

  It was not just the dot-com bust and all the hot air surrounding it that obscured all this from view. There were two other big clouds that moved in. The biggest, of course, was 9/11, which was a profound shock to the American body politic. Given 9/11, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions that followed, it’s not surprising that the triple convergence was los
t in the fog of war and the chatter of cable television. Finally, there was the Enron corporate governance scandal, quickly followed by blowups at Tyco and WorldCom—which all sent CEOs and the Bush administration running for cover. CEOs, with some justification, became guilty until proven innocent of boardroom shenanigans, and even the slavishly probusiness, pro-CEO Bush administration was wary of appearing—in public—to be overly solicitous of the concerns of big business. In the spring of 2004, I met with the head of one of America’s biggest technology companies, who had come to Washington to lobby for more federal funding for the National Science Foundation to help nurture a stronger industrial base for American industry. I asked him why the administration wasn’t convening a summit of CEOs to highlight this issue, and he just shook his head and said one word: “Enron.”