The World is Flat: The Triple Convergence (summary of chapter)

Around the year 2000, the ten flatteners began converging and working together in ways that created a new, flatter, global playing field. Both businesses and individuals began adopting new habits, skills, and processes to get the most out of it. They moved to a horizontal way of creating value. Other countries eventually joined in (e.g. China, India, the former Soviet Empire) and with their tools were able to collaborate with everyone else.

Convergence I: The convergence of the ten flatteners created a global, web-enabled platform for many forms of collaboration. This platform allows people, businesses, companies, and universities from all over the world to collaborate with each other. More people in more places have the power to access the flat world platform.

Convergence II: "Horizontilization" is the convergence of managers, innovators, business consultants, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs, and workers so that they all collaborate together horizontally instead of vertically. For example, HP collaborated with Cisco and Nokia to develop a camera/cell phone that beams it digitized pictures to an HP printer, which prints them out. Southwest Airlines allows their customers to download their boarding passes at home.

Convergence III: Countries all over the world began developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration. New players are popping up very fast, and the new forms of collaboration are available to more people. Those who learn the habits and skills the quickest will be the winners.

For the United States, triple convergence was lost with 9/11 and with the Enron scandal. The author of the book states that when he was researching for the book and was interviewing CEOs and technologists from major companies both American-based and foreign, they all described what he (the author) came to call the triple convergence. However, most of them were not telling the public or the politicians.