The World is Flat Breakfast
Tuesday, April 18th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The first IT|Redux breakfast took place today and was a great success. The goal of the meeting was to identify the 11th flattener, following Thomas Friedman’s list of 10 flatteners in The World is Flat.
Tim Clark suggested ‘Mobility’ as 11th flattener, Jeff Zwelling made a very convincing case for ‘Instant Feedback Loops’ as a comment to my original post, and all participants agreed that the flattening of the world is a process, not an outcome. Sanjay Kalra and Jeff Nolan also had good things to say about the event. I would like to thank everybody who partipated. Also, many thanks to Lohika for their sponsorship of the event.
The next breakfast will take place in the Bay Area sometime in May and will be dedicated to BPM 2.0. If you’re a BPM vendor or a BPM practitioner and would like to contribute to the definition of this new market category, drop me a line and I will add you to the guest list.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, Office 2.0, Offshoring, Open Source, SOA, SaaS
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Tom Friedman on Lou Dobbs
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Friedman and Lou Dobbs have been trading blows on national cable television and in other public forums for some time. In fact, in a recent lecture at Yale University, Friedman called Dobbs “a blithering idiot…”. Here’s an excerpt:
“And then you have a blithering idiot like Lou Dobbs, in my view, who’s using the platform of CNN in…the frame of a news show. This is not news. And so we have a political class not making sense of the world for people and that’s why the public…is so agitated.”
You can see the whole video here.
Also, Dobbs is countering Friedman on his show on CNN tonight (3:00 PM PST).
[…] I had a good time at Ismael Ghalimi’s World Is Flat Breakfast the other day. Other folks have done a better job of blogging the whole event than I can. However, I did get a couple tidbits worth repeating. […]
I reviewed Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat here. Thomas Friedman uses history as an art form rather than a science. He takes things out of his imagination and calls them important times in history that caused or will cause imbalances in globalization and free trade. He uses statistics that do not compute with the past. Reporting of statistics have changed over the years, especially with the reporting of unemployment rates. The unemployment reporting of the 1970s was very different from the one used in present times.
In other comparisons, he uses what he calls “flatteners” and this is when he makes history an art form rather than a science. History usually is both art and science. However there are checks and balances to curtail someone’s imagination getting out of control. Things existing only in Friedman’s imagination are presented as realities. See Examples here, here, here, and there, and note an overview of author Brian Alger about “communication by rank” where people like Friedman ignore many things, including the fact that workers have no voice in the process of globalization and free trade, even though they are the root, core and heart of it all.
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