Flat_

It only took me eight months, but I finally finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. Clearly, I’m not one of those pick up a book and never put it down types, but the book really was more deserving of due dilligence. But as I remarked in an earlier post, life has sort of gotten in the way. It’s strange to reflect that when I first picked the book up, I was swimming along quite contently in my career at UPS and now, after trudging along through it, I finish it 3 weeks into a new job. But that has nothing to do with a flat world, so let’s not dwell on that.

I’m about three and a half years late to the party on this book, but I don’t think the overarching concept was really new to me – working for one of the largest logistics companies in the world and getting two degrees in Industrial Engineering teaches you some things about how the global economy works. But Friedman’s writing is quite compelling and it was interesting to delve deeper into the how and why to better understand the what. Several times I wanted to put the book down and blog a quote from the book, but resisted the urge to nerd out. While it’s a little late for me to really add any of my own thoughts, here’s a little blurb that I really liked toward the end of the book referencing the story of the Tower of Babel from the Bible:

The heresy is not that mankind works together – it is to what ends. It is essential that we use this new ability [the internet] to communicate and collaborate for the right ends – for constructive human aims and not megalomaniacal ends … Collaborating so mankind can achieve its full potential is God’s hope.