Conclusion de la Flat World...

Accessing free information and being able to interact with anyone else on the planet was a big flattener in my world as it is in yours. Each individual has at least a handful of experiences to recount how his or her world flattened. Acquired knowledge will definitely help us become more effective and efficient in life’s task, or perhaps completely change our views, opinions or beliefs. So in that regard, most of us are just beginners and have a journey of life to cover, just like a new born baby does. The Flat concepts will allow each one of us to better function in the business world of tomorrow. In addition, it would defineltly have a great influence on our interpersonal skills and sense of humor, which will allow us to connect with others in a beneficial manner. I believe these strengths will give us the basic set of skills that we need to overcome our weakness and provide us with the foundation for building a successful career. Stretching beyond this and looking at the big picture and seeing things in context must be the goals that one needs to set.

In Darwin’s words: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”. So what do you think? I see my world flattening. I feel it everyday. And I guess it will become inevitable part of my everyday life. It’s a new game out there. Don’t complain about it – join and enjoy it. If you are not good enough to play in this different kind of game, you’ll simply be sitting on the sidelines watching others play.

The flat world doesn't end there...you will hear more of it in the coming blogs. Do drop in your appreciations and/ or shower your brickbats. A la prochaine !!

Courtesy: http://stratstars.pbwiki.com/

Old times sake - Communication and Information access

In the early 90s, communication and internet connectivity were dampeners too. My father waited for several years, to hear his first dial tone on a phone that he owned. Not long ago, say in the early 90's, I reminisce the times our family huddled around a telephone, we waited for a trunk call to speak to family members barely 1000 miles away. Even worse, before the arrival of the phone, the wait was as long as an hour from a public telephone booth. Kudos to the tehcie geniuses and teh DOT COM burst, today, it takes roughly an hour for me to get a permanent communication line, few minutes to get a mobile phone, and barely few seconds to get connected to my friends in Toronto or parents in Mumbai. As long as I have the money to pay, I could make my dial tone follow me wherever I am on the planet.

There were a few things that struck me as important as education. I remember my time as a School kiddo, when I spent several days showing my parents and sister how to access information on the internet. Now they can find more information than they’d ever need and can easily communicate with me in a few seconds on the Web. This “level playing field” for everyone was a distant dream twenty years ago. Pictures of needing a channel to watch Hollywood movies, tri-band transistors, video player that my father brought from overseas in 1987 are still fresh.

I was a vivid admirer of the world encyclopedia book and subscribing to such books in those days wasn’t easy. I had to pay hefty amounts to get to the local library to lay my hands on such books. It was certainly not a level playing field then.

Flatness is not about outsourcing and off shoring to India, China or any place under the sun; it is about access, crumbling of boundaries, ensuring that anyone in the world can build products and services from any part of the world and sell it in any part of the world where he/she can get maximum value. (a common definition that you will come across in the web)

My next chapter will include the conclusion to this Flat world concept, however the underlying fact about the Flat World as whole in the blog with different contents would remain the same - The World is Flat.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to any characted, fiction, or blogs is purely co-incidential.

Images: Connector --> courtesy: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/ and Books --> courtesy: http://psychservices.ucsd.edu/

Trippin' in this Flat World...

Recently I had the privilege of observing how flat the world was in the European countries visiting six of them in a span of three months. So many of the things I saw and did every day were similar to the activities in Mumbai, India and particularly with young people. The girls all wore low cut jeans or mini-skirts and the boys wore trendy trousers to teeshirts. I can’t recall seeing any ethnic dressing (that was the objective of visiting these places). Another thing, which made the world seem flat, is that practically everyone spoke English. Yes even when I was in France :) Though my trip to Brussels was business focused, I was able to visit several historic sites in Rome, including Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Vatican Museum, the fast paced life in Milan, learning the history and collecting the remains of the Berlin Wall, and not to forget the center of the earth Greenwich Meridian Time and the Queens Palace in London. Years ago, while in school, I had just read about all these and many more in school and used to enjoy the scenic beauties only in movies.I feel that this Flat World experience has changed everything. I visited most of these places that I could have never dreamt of visiting 10 years ago. Wikipedia and Google, basically enlightened me about every place I went, and all the things I saw. What a marvelous invention for travelers! I know I’ll never have the time to really learn in-depth and discover these things, but a little exposure to them is extremely interesting none-the-less. Kudos technology and Web 2.0 ;)

Outsourcing my Job !!

First and foremost, sincere apologies for the delayed write-up. The recent recessions of 2008 took some toll on me, with changes in net access, job function, and yes to some extent the food crunch. In this survival of the fittest, I happened to grab some action-packed Euro 2008 (well Azzuri’s didn’t play their heart out), and some Wimbledon. I decided to take some break from the routine and went onto join Business forums in Brussels. Now that my audience is convinced (or not so convinced) with my excuse, I would start with where we left…outsourcing in the flat world.

The World is Flat provided mixed insights over the concept in context. On one hand, I found the history of the digital revolution very fascinating and one that would keep the target readers glued (the book had a forward-looking nature - I’ve always been a science fiction fan). At other times, I got a little tired of the repetitive nature of Friedman’s examples – here comes yet another story of how someone makes a lot of money; followed by another example of how the Chinese and the Indians are preparing to conquer the world. After analyzing at some of the criticisms leveled against it, I can see that there is some merit in them. The central point of Friedman’s book is that globalization is removing barriers to competition, and reducing everything to the lowest common denominator: cost.

So why outsource? The following points can be considered as factors that drive outsourcing (points in order of importance)
1. Reduce Costs
2. Gaining access to skilled IT resources that are not available within the company that decides to outsource.
3. Free up internal resources, so that they can focus on product marketing and strategy
4. Accelerate company transformation
5. Accelerate the project
6. Reduce time to market, so that the organization is always in the race to satisfy the customer. After all customer is the King.

Reference: http://shipsoftware.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/distributedteam.jpg

Like every coin, that has two sides, the concept of Outsourcing has its advantages and disadvantages too.

I have been in Europe for a few years now with a leading Telecom firm in Belgium, presenting regular sessions to clients and resolving issues with/of my users and my team. While working for a team in the Product Readiness department, I identified a fairly critical issue/ bug with one of our vendor’s application system and called it to their technical support team, and this experience reminded me of one of the chapters in the book (as well as of O’reilly’s experience, similar to the one I will be presenting). In the process of resolving the bug, I contacted the developer from Czech/Israel, and explained the problem. After some investigation from the offshore development team, I obtained typical responses like – Please analyze the scenario introduced, Can you shut down all the instances of your server, and restart the scenario again? None of these things worked, not did I expect them to work, and the developer on the other side of the world was left scratching his head with a typical answer – I will get back to you after I investigate and identify the problem, if any!

I have faith in my thinking, analytical and cognitive abilities more than anyone else. I question basic assumptions and its validity when and where required. With this notion, I decided to go ahead and give them a hand by resolving the issue which was delegated to a member of my team. I started debugging the problem area and pointed out actual line numbers in their source file so they could take a look. My colleague noted down everything I’d said for his reference, and pushed an urgent patch of the bug fix later that evening.

I believe what I described is a good illustration of interaction that’s probably becoming more and more typical in the Flat World. I recognized a similarity between the above experience and the software industry. The off shoring of software development and testing is real, but does that mean I am afraid that someday my job maybe outsourced by a third world nation, like Somalia or Afghanistan as well? Perhaps it will be. But by that time it may not be a bad thing because I would have ‘retooled’ my skills and acquired the knowledge necessary to compete and continue to add value to my professional pursuits.

Brad Silverberg, Microsoft’s Hero, once said, “The role of every Microsoft employee is to work them out of job.” What he meant was that we should find ways to eliminate fire drills and provide solutions so our jobs “just happened.” The world is in constant change, and with it we must constantly change. We must never rest on our laurels because the moment we do, the world will surely pass by us.

P.s: The experiences described in this chapter are more or less similar to the experiences shared in the web by some of the bloggers. Though the examples set and the words used might be different, the underlying concept remains the same.

The Flat World Concept: The road to Innovation is a bumpy ride, but it's worth every mile...

The World is Flat is not a myth. It's all around us. When I first read the book, I was swept with this grandiose idea of the developing nations spreading their wealth that the developed and industrialized nations have to offer, in the form of jobs. The World is Flat is about the various business practices, such as the change management, the e-commerce and portal management, the internet, the blogs, online social networks and about multitude of other technological advances that the developing countries has seen in the past 15 years or so, and how it has globally flattened the level playing field of a company's and a country's economy. It surely has drastically altered the know-how of business and life in general these days. Even more exciting are the opportunities that lie ahead.

Image courtesy: http://www.businessinnovationinsider.com/

Personally I feel that the concept of The World is Flat is not limited to the competition amongst nations or companies, but it's a competition between me and my imagination. A strange analogy, but yes I feel that it's more about my creativity and innovation, and how I can contribute to the society. Coming from a leading technological firm, whose motto firmly believed with the Flat World concept, I had the privilege of listening to the notions of my childhood hero, Mr. Narayana Murthy. As a honorary chief guest for one of the award ceremonies, he made the mark with the following - Innovation is a journey and not a destination. What it meant was that the moment you feel you have achieved innovation, means that you are no longer innovating.

In this fast changing world, the a new business model is always in the making, and new operating model is always setup to support it. How quickly the transformation of this entire model takes place will determine the success of the new business model. Sometimes, it is enthralling to see new players coming from nowhere and making their mark as new leaders driving their business in all verticals. From my personal experience, I have had the privilege of observing these changes from a different perspective, and at times I respectfully disagree to some points mentioned in the book.

More about Flat World concepts in the next session - Off Offshoring and Flat World...

Day Zero - The New Beginning...

Dear Readers,

Welcome to my first "Experience Speaks" blog. A nice saturday morning in Brussels, with birds chirping around, it's summer around the corner. A hot coffee and some croissant to help with my thought process. Finally after two months of wait since my first registeration of this blog, I have finally decided to start penning down my experiences. I was looking for a perfect start, but later realized that perfection is just a matter of discipline.

I am an Indian, and the things I have experienced staying in Brussels for a little more than two years are more or less the same that I have experienced staying in Mumbai and Pune (India). It's a strange feeling to know that the world has changed a lot in the past decade around me. What was a distant dream of visiting far-off places, that I had read about only in books, is a reality now. The world has indeed gone Flat. Yes, that's the subject I would touch upon for this blog session.

Given my engineering background and my professional interests, I find this idea of a fast moving world, high-end cutting edge technology and changing strategy quiet interesting. Global practice is changing the basic assumptions that each organization has put forth and the policies that the government makes every few years. With all these changes happening quiet frequently, and with the markets tumbling around, marking the black period of U.S economy, 2008, it's right time to be in business. It's the right time to make most of the opportunities and most of the skills one possess. And that is why I anchored to start my blog on Thomas L. Friedman's - The World is Flat.

I personally consider it to be one of the top 10 books I have ever read, and given that I am a science fiction fan, I highly recommend you take a look at it. The readings have really changed my thought process and the perceptions about the life in general that revolves around me.

More to feature in my next blog...

Regards,
Anand