The World is Flat: How Companies Cope summary

Companies that have managed to grow today are those that are most prepared to change. They are the ones who recognize everything that can done thanks to the triple convergence, and have developed their own strategies to exploit it, instead of trying to resist it. Friedman highlights some of their rules and strategies:
-rule #1: when the world goes flat, and you are feeling flattened, reach for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Don't try to build walls.
-rule #2: the small shall act big. One way small companies flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really big. The key to being small and acting big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper.
-rule #3: the big shall act small. One way big companies learn to flourish in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their customers to act really big.
-rule #4: the best companies are the best collaborators. In the flat world, more and more businesses will be done through collaboration within and between companies because the next layers of value creation (such as technology, marketing, biomedicine, manufacturing) are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone.
-rule #5: in a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest X-rays, and then selling the results to their clients.
-rule #6: the best companies outsource to win, not to shrink. They outsource to innovate faster and more cheaply in order to grow larger, gain market share, and hire more and different specialists, not to save money by firing more people.
-rule #7: outsourcing is also for idealists.

The World is Flat: This is not a Test summary

Friedman states that getting Americans to rally around compassionate flatism is much more difficult than getting them to rally around anticommunism. America is going to have to sort out what to keep, what to discard, what to adapt, what to adopt, where to redouble our efforts, and where to intensify our focus. The flattening of the world is going to be disruptive to both traditional and developed societies. The weak will fall further behind faster, the traditional will feel the force of modernization more profoundly, the new will get turned into old quicker, and the developed will be challenged by the underdeveloped more profoundly. The rest of the chapter explains five action areas built around compassionate flatism:
-leadership: the job of every politician in America should be to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if the want to thrive within it. But the problem is that most politicians don't have a clue about the flat world.
-muscles: how government and business can enhance every worker's lifetime employability, which requires replacing fat (lifetime employment) with muscle (lifetime employability).
-good fat: e.g. social security, wage insurance (which should be added).
-social activism: the relationship between global corporations and their own moral consciousness needs to be sorted out.
-parenting: helping individuals adapt to a flat world is also the job of parents. They need to know about the world in which their child is growing up in.

The World is Flat: The Quiet Crisis summary

In this chapter Friedman explains how America is not ready to compete, is not getting every individual to think about he or she can upgrade his or her educational skills, and is not investing in the secrets of America's "sauce." This chapter further explains what will happen if we don't change the fact that we aren't doing those things. The rest of the chapter is broken into sections titled "Dirty Little Secret..."
-#1: The Numbers Gap: the generation of scientists and engineers are reaching retirement years and are not being replaced in the numbers as they must be if America wants to remain ahead of the pack. Half of America's scientists are 40 years or older, and the average age is steadily rising.
-#2: The Education Gap at the Top: America is not educating or interesting enough of our own young people in math, science, and engineering.
-#3: The Ambition Gap: Not only is outsourcing cheaper and efficient, but the quality and productivity boost is huge. When jobs are sent abroad, companies not only save 75% on wages but also get 100% increase in productivity.
-#4: The Education Gap at the Bottom: the public school system. Delegated education power to local school boards organized by wealth.
-#5: The Funding Gap: special research and projects need more funding
-#6: The Infrastructure Gap: the smartest countries and cities in the world are offering their residents the fasted broadband at the lowest prices to the widest areas. The flat-world platform makes innovation and production more efficient but Americans can't take advantage of it because we don't have the infrastructure or the education to do so.

Friedman adds that our fate can be different, but only if we start doing things differently.

The World is Flat: The Untouchables summary

Friedman states that in the flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest
worker, no matter where he or she resides. The key to surviving in a flat world is figuring out how to make yourself an "untouchable." These are the people whose jobs
cannot be outsourced, digitized, or automated. The untouchables in a flat world fall into three categories:
-those who are "special or specialized" such as star athletes, celebrities, brain surgeons, and the top cancer researcher. These are the people who can never be outsourced, automated, or made tradable by electric transfer.
-those who are "localized" and "anchored". These are the people whose jobs must be done in a specific location, either because they require special knowledge or because they require face-to-face interaction. These would include barbers, waiters, dentists, chefs, plumbers, nurses, repairmen, gardeners, divorce lawyers, etc.
-those who were in formerly "middle-class jobs", such as assembly line workers, data entry workers, securities analysts, etc. These are jobs that were once considered nontradable but are now considered tradable thanks to the ten flatteners.

New middle jobs are popping up, but to get and keep these jobs you need certain skills that can make you special, specialized, or anchored, and therefore untouchable.
Such new jobs fall under the following categories:
-great collaborators and orchestrators (those who collaborate with others or orchestrate collaboration between companies)
-great synthesizers (these are people like SEOs)
-the great explainers (managers, teachers, writers, producers, etc. who can see complexity but explain it with simplicity)
-the great leveragers (combining the best of what computers can do with the best of what humans can do)
-the great adaptors (those who can adapt and are versatile)
-the green people (the environmentalists who can figure out how to do things with less energy and fewer emissions)
-the passionate personalizers (such as the lemonade man at Camden Yards who adds a personal" touch to the lemonade)
-the great localizers (small and medium-sized businesses)

The World is Flat: America & Free Trade summary

This chapter is about how even as the world gets flat, America as a whole will benefit more by sticking to the general principles of free trade than by building walls. However, a policy of free trade is not enough by itself. It must be accompanied by a domestic strategy of upgrading the education of every American, and a foreign strategy of opening restricted markets all over the world.

Although jobs are often lost in bulk to outsourcing of large companies, new jobs are also being created by small companies that you can't see. New jobs and new specialties are continually being created. America as a whole will do fine in a flat world with free trade if it continues to provide knowledge workers who are able to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created. There is no limit to the number of idea-generated jobs in the world. There are infinite industries to be created, infinite business to be started, and infinite jobs to be done. The only limiting factor is human imagination.

One new specialty job that is growing is search engine optimizers (SEOs). SEOs study algorithms that are being used by the major search engines to produce their search results, and then try to design marketing and Web strategies that will push their company up the rankings.