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----------------------------- 2385 - GLOBALIZATION - The World is Flat
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- I read a great book by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat, A Brief History of the 21st Century, dated 2005. I had just retired from HP in 2003. Friedman’s description of globalization and how it is changing the world in India and China and, in contrast, how it is changing for the worst in Al-Quada and terrorism was very real to me at the time. Here we are 15 years later and our President Donald Trump is dealing with Flat World results.
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- This is one of his stories a story about a teacher, Abraham Georges, working in the poorest among poverty outside Bangalore, India. These village people are referred to as untouchables.
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- George came out of the Indian Army and immigrated to the US graduating from New York University, started his own software firm, sold it in 1998, and took his fortune to India. He felt that India would never improve its governance unless it had the transparency of a free press and he started a journalist school in this remote village.
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- Thomas, our author, was a guest speaker at the school. He learned about George’s elementary school that he had started even further into the outskirts of Bangalore. The word wretched does not begin to describe the living conditions around this school.
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- The school itself was neatly painted surrounded by grass and flowers. The elementary classroom had 20 untouchables at computers working on Excel and Microsoft Word. The adjacent classroom had a typing class. Thomas asked the teacher who was the fastest typist. She pointed to an 8 year old with a smile that could have melted a glacier.
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- I want to race you he told her. All her classmates gathered round. Thomas crunched himself into the tiny seat in front of a computer and each proceeded to type the same phrase over and over seeing who could do more in a minute. Who’s winning Thomas shouted. Her classmates shouted her name and cheered her on. Thomas surrender to her gleeful laugh.
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- The selection process to get into this school is a child must be below the poverty line with parents willing to send their child to a boarding school. The students had just taken the California Achievement tests shortly before Thomas arrived.
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- George explained they are teaching them English education so they can aspire to careers and professions that would have been totally beyond their reach. Around India their names are recognized as untouchables. But if they go somewhere else, and if they are polished, with proper education and social graces they can break this barrier that has been over untouchables for generations.
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- With the right education they can become another type of untouchables, young people with ambition, specialized in skills, and adaptable, highly competitive in a global marketplace.
- When you talk about the poor, so often it is talk about getting them off the streets or getting them a job, so they don’t starve. But we never talk about getting excellence from the poor.
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- His thought was that we can deal with the issue of inequality, if they could break out of all the barriers imposed upon them. If one is successful, they will carry one thousand with them.
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- In Palestine Yasser Arafat had produced students who were martyrs in waiting. Their role models were all angry men. These young men spent a lot of time imagining how to unleash their anger, not realizing their potential.
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- Abraham George had produced a different set of teacher role models for his untouchable children. They planted in these students seeds of a very different imagination.
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- If we are to defeat terrorism we need more Abraham Georges, everywhere, by the thousands. Teachers that can gaze upon a classroom of untouchable kids and not only see the greatness in each of them but, more important, get them to see the greatness in themselves while endowing them with the tools to bring that out.
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- After the little typing race Thomas went around the classroom and asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. They were 8 years old and 3 years ago came out of a life in open sewers. The answers came back, an astronaut, a doctor, a pediatrician, a poetess, physics and chemistry, a scientist, a surgeon , a detective, an author.
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- All dreamers in action, not martyrs in waiting.
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- Individuals in every corner of the world are being empowered by its flatness. This will mean a whole new level of competition for American children. They better have a good education and the right attitude or they will not be competitive in this new world. In a flat world every individual must tend to his own economic destiny.
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- Let’s get back to India. The country is graduating 70,000 accountants every year. Their starting salaries are $100 per month. US radiologists are outsourcing reading of CAT scans to doctors in India. They do it overnight (for us) and doctors have the results the next morning.
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- In 2005 there are 245,000 Indians answering phones in call centers. It is a 24/7 job that Indians consider with high wages and high prestige. India’s business schools turn out 89,000 MBA’s each year.
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- In China 70,000 housewives are doing data-entry work at home. They take handwritten Japanese documents and enter them into a digital database. Many of these housewives are specialists in medical or legal terminologies. A Chinese software engineer starts at $90/ month in year 2005.
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- Of course, the flat world is not just in India and China. In Utah, JetBlue has outsourced their entire reservation system to 400 Utah housewives. Today, 23,500,000 Americans are working from home, 16% of our labor force.
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- McDonald’s in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, uses order takers in a call center in Colorado Springs, 900 miles away. The order and a customer photo is relayed to the restaurant kitchen. The customer’s order and photo are paired up at the window. The photo is destroyed. It takes 1 minute and 5 seconds for the whole transaction.
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- Before the call center, the orders averaged 2 minutes and 36 seconds. The restaurant can now handle 260 cars an hour. Customers can sit down in the restaurant and order using their cell phones with credit card readers on the tables.
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- A one man network/newspaper can get a report on the Web using an MP3 player for the digital recorder and a camera phone. Cost for equipment $200. These bloggers peaked with the Dan Rather National Guard story having 55,000 bloggers helping break Rathergate. An army of dedicated fact-checkers uncovered the fake memo story in 48 hours.
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-------- Friedman identifies 10 forces that are causing this flat world:
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---------------------- (1) The fall of the Berlin Wall 11-9-89 made the world whole.
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---------------------- (2) Netscape went public 8-9-95 with e-mail and internet browsing that brought the same information to the whole world. Netscape was sold to AOL for $10,000,000,000.
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---------------------- (3) The first fiber optic system was installed in 1977. The dot.com boom in 6 years invested $1,000,000,000,000 in wiring the world with fiber. Long distance phone rates dropped from $2 per minute to 10 cents a minute.
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---------------------- (4) XML, software to software interaction sharing standard formats and protocols became a huge flattener.
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---------------------- (5) Open sourcing making software free. Chinese firms can digital scan an entire car and churn out computer aided design models of every part. These designs can feed industrial robots and within months they can be cloning an American car on their production in months.
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---------------------- (6) Outsourcing started with Y2K. The year 2000 computer scare caused the outsourced a lot of software writing to India. This set the precedence.
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---------------------- (7) China has an army of engineers growing at 350,000 annually.
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---------------------- (8) Supply-chaining, Wal-Mart moves 2,300,000,000 cartons of merchandise on a global scale every year (2005). Wal-Mart set up its own distribution center for all manufacturers to ship to one location and got its own trucks to do the shipping.
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- This cost 3% more. But cutting out wholesales and buying direct saved 5%. That allowed Wal-Mart to cut prices by 2% and make it up in volume. In 2004 they sent $260,000,000,000 of merchandise through 108 distribution centers, serving 3,000 stores in the US. There point of sale terminals simultaneously track inventory deductions with each sale.
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- Large packages have RFID, radio frequency tags, that allow the packages to be tracked through the entire distribution chain. When the hurricane was bearing down on Florida, Wal-Mart sent more beer early and more pop-tarts later. If Wal-Mart was a country it would be China’s 8th biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia, and Canada.
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---------------------- (9) UPS is showing the world how it is done. UPS has a fleet of 270 aircraft. It ships 13,500,000,000 packages a day, a day. If you ship in your Toshiba laptop for repair it actually goes to UPS and UPS does the repair and sends it back within 3 days.
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- If you go on-line and order Nike’s UPS has the inventory in Kentucky and UPS is the one pulling the inventory and delivering your shoes. Same is true if you order Jockey.com underwear. UPS is in collaboration with eBay, PayPal, and eBay buyers. -
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- On any day 2% of the world’s GDP can be found on UPS delivery trucks. The clip board in the little brown truck tells the driver which shelf to find each package. If he is at a wrong address a GPS link will not allow him to deliver the package.
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---------------------- (10) The Google, Yahoo, MSN web search have informed the world. The democracy of information is what brought down the Berlin Wall. Google is now processing 1 billion searches each day ( 2/3rds outside the US).
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- Google is hiring the brightest mathematicians in the world to write their search algorithms. TiVo knows which ads you are freezing, storing, rewinding on your own TV. The most rewound moment in TV history, Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. Google knows exactly how many times you clicked on their ads and exactly what you are interested in.
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---------------------- (11) The wireless revolution is what will put all the above forces on steroids. Your cell phone will become your credit card. You see a Madonna poster. You scan the bar code in the lower corner and automatically buy tickets to her concert. Another scan and it downloads a sample of her songs. Scan another and you can buy the album.
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- Rolls-Royce engines are connected by transponders sending data to a satellite and back down to Rolls-Royce operations. It can track anomalies in its engines while in operation and relay information back to the pilot.
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- From 1985 to 2000 the global economy grew from 2.5 billion to 6 billion people, adding 1,500,000,000 billion new workers. There are already more cell phones in China than people in the United States.
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- When I was a boy my Mom would say, “Eat your vegetables there are children in China and India that are starving.” For your children you will say, “Finish your homework there are people in China and India that are starving for your jobs.”
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- Everyone is going to have to improve themselves in order to compete. Natural talent is starting to trump geography. An engineer in India can do your job just as well as an engineer in Russia.
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- One person’s economic liberation is another person’s unemployment. Many American graduates are going to enter the work world and hear Simon Cowell say, “You have no talent“. India’s call centers had 1,000,000 applications for 9,000 jobs.
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- Message to your kids is to become truly adaptable, constantly acquire new skills, knowledge, and expertise that will enable you to constantly create value.
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- America has 4,000 colleges, the rest of the world has 7,768. California alone has 130 colleges. Yet, graduate enrollment in science and engineering in the US has declined since 1993.
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- Congress has a pork laden budget that cuts funding to the National Science Foundation. Half of America’s engineers are over 40. 40% (18,146) of the people in NASA are over 50, only 4% are under 30.
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- In 2003 engineering degrees were issued to 1,200,000 Asian students, 830,000 Europeans, and 400,000 Americans. Only 5% of our students graduate with engineering degrees. In Russia it is 25% and in China it is 46%.
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- In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears and that is our problem. American education from kindergarten to 12th grade is not stimulating young people to want to go into science, math, and engineering. Judging by the international tests the longer our kids are in school the dumber they are getting. Too often the football coach is teaching science.
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- Intel is welcomed in Chinese and Indian schools. In America, Intel is blocked by state governments from helping teachers make science more interesting. Intel knows its chips are made from just two things, sand and brains.
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- If we are to help our kids elementary schools should be embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large, crash program for science and engineering education, immediately. This is not a test. It is life in the 21st century.
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- Our politicians are stuck on stupid, they offer one-liners to embarrass political rivals, because they lack the ability to have a numerical discussion. They tear down our policies and presidents and offer nothing to get us on the right track and moving faster. (This seems especially true in 2019 with today’s politics.)
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- Our leaders vision should be to have every man and woman in America on campus. We should grant a 5 year work visa to any foreign student who completes a Ph.D. in an American University.
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- Everyone wants economic growth but no one wants change. Albert Einstein said, “Out of clutter, find simplicity, from discord, find harmony, in the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.” We are in the middle of difficulty and do not realize it.
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- Dell has figured this out. On an average day they sell 150,000 computers. From time of order parts are pulled in Malaysia, assembled in Penang, and arrive in Nashville in four days.
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- General Electric has figured this out with its biggest research facility in Bangalore, India, employing 7,000 engineers. When India threatened war with Pakistan over Kashmir, GE got word to their government leaders that if GE pulled out of India due to instability they would not be back. The cease-fire was brought not by General Powell but by General Electric (We Bring Good Things to Life).
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- When a society has more memories than dreams it is in trouble. They are not mining the present but chewing on the past.
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- India has 150,000,000 Muslims, yet none are in al-Qaeda. Indians have dreams. America is the land of dreams, but our kids need the tools to compete in this new flat world of the 21st century.
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- So much still applies 15 years after this was written.
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- May 30, 2019 575 576
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