The World Is Flat Redeux

I wanted to take a minute to respond to a very legitimate comment made on an older post of mine, when I was discussing how I thought Friedman's flat world analogy pertained to the field of learning. Here was the comment from Rigasite:

Dear Ted, all this nonsense about competing in a flat world is in fact a way for large companies to impose the idea that they need less controls in hiring staff, less controls in reporting profits, less controls in doing business. How else can you interpret its presentation: " transition towards a more integrated global economy poses some monumental challenges for many European democracies, burdened by inflexible and engrained structures and cultural rigidities An environment of continuous innovation must be created as innovation is becoming the key driver of economic success. " So innovation would mean just a more liberal and less controled environment. Unfortunatly history has proved this idea to be wrong. A cooperation between entreprises, governments, education, and research institutions has never emerged "naturally" but under some institutional pressure. Industrial strength has never been without the actrive support pf the government. And the US is the best proof: the weigth of large public markets on the corporations that rae providers of the government (and large innovators also) is a simple fact. What really bothers me here is not the historical falsness of the arguments. But rather the fact that the online learning technologies are relaying this ideology (just in the same way that ten years ago "organizational management" was the voice of large corporations).

My response: I certainly do not disagree with the notion (reality) that the "flattening" of the world economy could be considered a euphemism for further exploitation of the global workforce (capital will flow to the least expensive locations). But that is not my point. The point that I was trying to make in the previous posts on the subject was to draw a parallel with Friedman's concepts and modern learning/collaboration technologies. When anyone in the world with a computer and internet connection can express themselves for all the world to see (via blog, podcast, YouTube, social networking, etc.)--that is as flat as it gets! And we can take advantage of this opportunity to flatten the ways we go about facilitating enterprise learning--by enabling unencumbered collaborative knowledge sharing amongst employees, partnbers, and customers.

And, as a side note, here's a link to a podcast series with a number of thought leaders that Eilf Trondsen and I produced a while back on this very subject. We interviewed a number of interesting academics and industry leaders, including:

• John Seely Brown, past Director of Xerox PARC, author, and visiting scholar at USC
• Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley marketing guru
• Curtis R. Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International Bill Coleman, CEO, Cassatt Corporation
• And many others