A brief overview of the ten world-flatteners introduced by Thomas L. Friedman in his book 'The World is Flat'.

1. A Flat World:World-Flatteners Neha Ahmed

2. In 2005, Thomas L. Friedman published a book called ‘The World is Flat’. The concept of a ‘flat world’ that he introduced is that our world today is one where walls between people and countries have been knocked down, making everyone in the world inter-connected. Things that help to ‘flatten’ these walls around us are called ‘wall-flatteners’ There are ten ‘wall-flatteners’, and these are the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Netscape, workflow Software, open source, outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, insourcing, in-forming, and “The Steroids”. Each is described individually in the following slides. Introduction

3. The Wall was blocking both our path and our sight to move forward. The Fall was the beginning of a chain reaction that led to freedom. The Fall of the Berlin Wall

4. An internet browser Broadened the audience of the World Wide Web Made the web more accessible and used by more companies Netscape

5. Machines communicating with each other without human involvement Examples include file conversation and e-mail filtering Workflow Software

6. Something that is open for people from all over the world to add to, contribute to, and edit Examples include wikis (such as Wikispaces and Wikipedia), blogs, and Question/Answer sites (YahooAnswers etc) Open Source

7. When a company pays workers from outside of their company to do part of the work they need or to supply them materials Using sources from outside of one’s own company, group, or organization Outsourcing

8. When a company moves its factory to another country There is much off-shoring in China due to low labour costs Offshoring

9. Best example: WallMart A customer purchases something and the details of the purchase are immediately sent to manufacturers without any human interference Supply-chaining

10. When a company’s employees perform services for another company Saves on shipping costs Example: UPS repairing Toshiba computers or Nikon cameras Insourcing

11. Easy and open access to a wide range of knowledge Example: search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Ask In-forming

12. Personal digital devices Can be used anytime, anywhere, by anyone Examples: mobile phones, iPods, laptops “The Steroids”

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