ON TRUST IN A "FLAT WORLD"

JUST A LITTLE MORE TRUST

A personal custom of mine going into the New Year's holidays, is to take one of the books I've read over the course of the year, for a closer re-read.  It sometimes makes for new discoveries in a familiar favorite.

This year's "re-read" book, probably no surprise to many, is Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat".

Part of the reason I picked this book, in all honesty, was that I've received no fewer than three copies of this book as a gift over the last couple of months, and the most recent copy found it's way into my bag in a frenzied bout of packing for the New Year's trip.  And I'm glad it did.

I've posted on this book a number of times earlier this year, as have others like Tom Evslin.

Although a lot of the themes that are covered in the book have been familiar to many following technology over the last few years, Friedman does an excellent job collecting them in in cohesive lists and chapters in the book, and then connecting the "dots" with great anecdotal stories from his interviews with many representative companies and people around the globe.

Assuming many of you have read and/or at least skimmed the book, I thought I'd touch on a few of the unexpected surprises and "non-obvious takeaways" that I got from the re-read.  I'll do this over a few posts over the course of the first week of this New Year.

The first "non-obvious takeaway" came at page 142 for me, where the author describes his surprise at learning that UPS as he puts it, "was not just delivering packages anymore".

Instead, it was "synchronizing global supply chains for companies large and small".  Now, that in itself sounds good, what with all the cool buzzwords and all.

But Friedman gives an example that boils it down to something that a mainstream reader can connect with:

"If you own a Toshiba laptop computer that is under warranty and it breaks and you call Toshiba to have it repaired, Toshiba will tell you to drop it off at a UPS store and have it shipped to Toshiba, and it will get repaired and then be shipped back to you.

But here's what they don't tell you:  UPS doesn't just pick up and deliver your Toshiba laptop.  UPS actually repairs the computer in its own UPS-run workshop dedicated to computer and printer repairs in its Louisville hub...

...I found myself dressed in a blue smock, in a special clean room, watching UPS employees replacing motherboards in broken Toshiba laptops."

So basically, UPS has set up  special service centers for various corporate customers.  Friedman calls this "insourcing".

This of course, is different than the better-known, oft controversial "outsourcing", underway ferociously in India, China and elsewhere. 

Reading the above section brought on a sense of deja vu from earlier sections in the book.  Flipping back, I found the source of the deja vu on page 21, where the author describes wandering around a large Indian call center operated by "24/7" in Bangalore:

"Each vast floor of a call center consists of clusters of cubicles.  The young people work in little teams under the banner of the company whose phone support they are providing.  So one corner might be the Dell group, another might be flying the flat of Microsoft..."

And from a page 6 description of a visit to the Bangalore campus of Infosys, one of India's premier IT services companies:

"Security is tight, cameras monitor the doors, and if you are working for American Express, you cannot get into the building that is managing services and research for General Electric".

For me, the point of these three seemingly unrelated sections on outsourcing and insourcing, is how critical components of a company's operations are being handled by TRUSTED outside providers.

Enterprises are learning to go down the same road of being a little more TRUSTING in exchange for more services and efficiencies, JUST as consumers with "Web 2.0" services.

On the consumer Web 2.0 side, where a little more trust than most mainstream users are comfortable with gets them so much more in terms of convenient, most-of-the-times "free", critical every-day services like rich email, instant messaging, PC desktop indexing, online photo storage, sharing, tagging services, and much, much more.  All in exchange for a little more "trust".

In a similar way, businesses worldwide are trading somewhat less privacy, maybe a touch less security, and greater risk of exposing proprietary data, for MUCH greater efficiency, time-to-market, lower costs, along with more streamlined production, supply and support services.

What's interesting is that COUNTRIES also need to learn this lessons of TRUSTING to depend on outsiders for their own good, just as companies and consumers have to date.

On page 326, there's a vivid section that discusses the problems many Arab countries have had resulting from a relative lack of TRUST:

"Tribal culture and thinking still dominate in many Arab countries, and the tribal mind-set is also anathema to collaboration.  What is the motto of the tribalist?

Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the outsider.

And what is the motto of the globalists, those who build collaborative supply chains?

Me and my brother and my cousin, three friends from childhood, four people in Australia, two in Beijing, six in Bangalore, three from Germany, and four people we've met only over the Internet all make up a single, global, supply chain."

What a pithy illustration of how enterprise-driven global supply chains have been "Web 2.0" way before Web 2.0 became cool. 

And what an illustration of world-changing companies like Skype et al got started.

Trusting the Web 2.0 way...it's not just for consumers anymore.

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