The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman

American was going to be challenged...but the challenge would be good for America because we are always at our best when we are being challenged. 

Blogs have given the people a chance to stop yelling at their TV and have a say in the process.

The fall of the Berlin Wall...if you were not a democracy or a democratizing society, if you continued to hold fast to highly regulated or centrally planned economics, you were seen as being on the wrong size of history. 

People will change their habits quickly when they have a strong reason to do so, and people have an innate urge to connect with other people. 

There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world...the commercial future belongs to those who know ho to make the richest chocolate sauce,  the sweetest lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae. 

Companies that design their software, systems, website, and encyclopedias to encourage participation will be the ones that draw the most users. 

More than ever, we can all now be producers, not just consumers. 

Wal-Mart today is the biggest retailer in the world and it does not make a single thing. 

Building a process that delivers stuff across the globe is not only difficult, it's very very hard to duplicate. 

Either you get flat, or you get flattened by China. 

In this world, a smart and fast global supply chain is becoming one the most important ways for company to distinguish itself from its competitors. 

While its competitors guarded sales information, Wal-mart approached its suppliers as if their were partners, not adversaries. 

What I think I have to do is institutionalize the sense of obligation to society to the same extent that we have institutionalized the commitment to the customer. 

Companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and TiVo have learned to thrive not by pushing products and services on their customers so much as by building collaborative systems that enable customers to pull on their own and then responding with lighting quickness to what they pull. It is so much more efficient.

The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology or a new platform of technologies is combined with new ways of doing business.  

It is this triple convergence - of new players, on a new playing field, developing new process and habits for horizontal collaboration - that I believe is the most important force  shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty first century. 

Americans have consistently led in innovation over the last century. Americans wining [about outsourcing] we have never seen that before. 

Now, I would rather be a genius born in China than  an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.

More and more, politics in the flat world will consist of asking which values, frictions, and fats are worth preserving - which should, in Marx's language, be kept solid - and which must be left to melt away into the air. 

There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea-generated jobs in the world. 

If you believe human wants and needs are infinite, then there are infinite industries to be created, infinite businesses to be started, and infinite jobs to be done, and the only limiting factor is human imagination.

The way to succeed is not by stopping the railroad line from connecting you, but by firing up your imagination, by upgrading your skills, and by adopting those practices, rules, policies, and educational institutions that will enable you and your society to claim a healthy slice of the bigger but more complex pie. 

Today's workers need to approach the workplace...like someone preparing for the Olympics but doesn't know what sport they are going to enter. They have to be ready to do anything. 

Perhaps people skills will become more valuable than computer skills. The geeks may not inherit the earth afterall. 

Now that foreigners can do left brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right brain work better. 

When you hear your parents or your college graduation speaker telling you to "do what you love," they are not giving you some syrupy pabulum. They are giving you a survival strategy. 

In China today Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today Britney Spears is Britney Spears - and that is our problem. 

The muscles workers need more are portable benefits and opportunities for lifelong learning...Because they are the most important assets in making a working mobile and adaptable. 

We all have to be owners as well as wage earners. That is where public policy has to be focused - the make sure that people have wealth producing assets as they enter the twenty first century. 

Instead of just being focused on protecting those with existing capital...let's focus instead on widening the circle of capital owners. 

The Indians, for instance, take the view that the Moguls come, the Moguls go, the British come, the British go, we take the best and leave the rest - but we still eat curry and our women still wear saris, and we still live in tightly bound extended family units. Thats glocalizing at its best. 

It is simply too easily forgotten that when it comes to economic activities, one of the greatest virtues a country or community can have is a culture of tolerance. 

The whole article was about why we are giving them are glue, when the right attitude would be How much more glue can we sell them? We still need to break some mental barriers. 

When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you. 

You will differentiate your company from the others by how you do business.

The most popular food in the world is not the Big Mac. Its pizza. And what is pizza? It is just a flat piece of dough on which every culture puts its own distinctive foods and flavors. 

My belief is that the global is going to be interesting only if it is a range of the local. 

We are operating under the old rules and then the old rules changed, but nobody put up a sign. 

If your arguments or video or photos or voice are compelling, you'll eventually find an audience or it will find you.

Too often we have anti poverty debates but not proentrepreneurship debates. The inspiration al power of a local business success story in incalculable: there is no greater motivator for the poor than looking at one of their own who makes it big and saying: "If she can do it, I can do it. "

Two people and a computer were able to create better lives for three hundred people (in Cambodia), Two people and a website can now do anything. 

There is a iron law in American politics: The party that most quickly absorbs and adopts the latest technology dominates politics. FDR dominated the radio through the fireside chat; JFK triumphed over Nixon in televised debates; Republicans rose to power on talk radio; Karl Rove mastered the use of direct mail and computerized databases. 

I learned that the way you get big change is by getting the big players to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

The disease of the Internet age: continuous partial attention. 

No wonder people have to do online dating: Your chances of a chance encounter now on a ski left or on a train or a bus are so much lower today than they used to be, because the chances that the person sitting next to you will be absorbed in a handheld device rather than being open to engaging the person next to him or her, are so much higher. 

When we think about health problems in the developing world, the men are almost invisible, except as a source of part of the problem. Its all about the women.

When people, particularly people who are illiterate, say something and it gets immediately represented on the wall, they feel really validated, and therefore they get more animated and more engaged. 

This humiliation is key. It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money. It is spawned by the poverty of dignity. 

Most middle class Arabs and Muslims, I am convinced, were not celebrating the death of three thousand innocent Americans on 9/11...but many Arabs and Muslims were celebrating the idea of putting a fist in American's face - and they were quietly applauding the men who did it. 

Green is the new Red, White, and Blue

Let's leave the cave dwelling to bin Laden. We have to be masters of our imaginations, not the prisoners. 

Europeans and others often like to make fun of American optimism and naivete - our crazy notion that every problem has a solution, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that the future can always bury the past. But I have always believed that deep down the rest of the world envies that American optimism and naivete. It needs American optimism. 

Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

When you are part of a community that you feel ownership in it is different. You have a stake. 

The French revolution, the American revolution, the Indian democracy and even eBay are all based on social contracts whose dominant feature is that authority comes from the bottom up, and people can and do feel self empowered to improve their lot. People living in such contexts tend to spend thir time focusing on what to do next, not on whom to blame next. 

One good example is worth a thousand theories.