I've been reading The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century for a couple of weeks now (it was a Christmas present from my mom). I finished on my trip to Charlotte last week. Overall, I think it's an outstanding book, with a lot of information about globalization and the impact it is having on the business world of today. As someone in a field that has been hit by outsourcing, offshoring, and so on, I enjoyed reading an account of how those things came about.

Friedman's main tenet is that the world is getting smaller and flatter. Not in a pre-Columbus European cosmological sense, but rather in the sense of leveling the playing field. The impact of that flattening is that those of us in professions that can be moved around the globe will have to move quickly to stay relevant. Personally, this rings true to me, and isn't as scary as I initially thought. It basically says that if you want to keep a job in (for example) software programming, you need to keep your skills up to date, be willing to be entrepreneurial about finding a competitive niche into which you fit, and stay flexible.

The factors that Friedman sees as flatteners are the things that bring information workers around the world closer together. Things like internet connectivity, an improved political environment, and workflow software. The book is effective at describing the state of the business world for international companies, and gave some interesting insights into how things might change in the next decade.

The end of the book gets a bit preachy about the need to let this process happen, but overall I liked it very much.