The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, the runaway bestseller by New York Times columnist Friedman has now been on the paper's Bestseller list for over 85 weeks and has sold over 2 million copies in hardcover alone.
Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, authors of The World is Flat? – A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller, say that Friedman's book is full of factual and argumentative inaccuracies, some deliberate and some as a result of living in the CEO bubble. In their book, Ramdoo and Aronica conduct a step-by-step demolition of nearly all the points that Mr. Friedman makes in his book.
The interview has been split in two parts due to the length. Here's part one. (Part two has now also been published.)
Q) What prompted you to write this book? Were you primarily motivated by wanting to straighten the record? Can you also talk a little more about your background and how this book came about?
RA: With a 30-year career at the intersection of business and technology under my belt, I co-authored a book in 2001, The Death of “E” and the Birth of the Real New Economy. In that book, we described how the technology-enabled globalization of white-collar work would be the new frontier in the world economy. The book is about business transformation as a result of the world being wired and the capability that the Internet provides to interconnect business processes around the globe. It was time to prepare for a whole new way of operating a business. In 2006, I picked up a copy of Friedman’s book and was floored by its superficiality. But what was more shocking to me was the fact that millions of copies had been sold and its influence on leaders in business and government. Indeed, I wanted to set the record straight, for globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and the stories Friedman spun are but a small piece of the overall tapestry of this monumental transformation.
Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted in cooperation — and it is rooted in violence. For some, it represents the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in democracy, world peace and universal prosperity; for others, it represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and an utter disregard for humanity.
Yet, the person on the street, especially in America, has little clue what globalization is all about. Few have any doubt that change is placing the world under great stress — that it is being turned upside down. And they may suspect that it has to do with the word, globalization, which increasingly appears in the press and other media. But what does it really mean? It would be great if a popularizer, a famous personality or pundit, would explain the many political, economic and social issues connected to the phenomenon of globalization. Desperate for such information, millions of people, including leaders in government and education, have turned to Friedman’s mass market book to gain an understanding of globalization. Unfortunately, they are served up stories about Friedman’s friends, elite CEOs and other personal contacts.
Article comments
1 - Jake
The following is writing response assignment I have done for my English class on the world is flat?. Is my analysis misguided or is it nearer to the truth than Friedman was?
In this critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the reader receives an occasional glimpse into Friedman’s book itself. Some of these glimpses are more disturbing than others and some are even given appropriate recognition by the authors of the critique, Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo. However, there is one excerpt from Freidman’s book which I found to be far and above the most disturbing and culturally degrading. In this section Friedman asserts that there are certain jobs in our new flat world that have become “untouchable”. These “jobs” are demarcated by Freidman as the Great Collaborators and Orchestrators, the Great Synthesizers, the Great Explainers, the Great Leveragers, the Great Adapters, the Passionate Personalizers, and the Great Localizers. As Aronica and Ramdoo have paraphrased this proposal from Friedman’s book, “we should all become masters of social, organizational, and motivational skills”, or as they go on to say, managers. The most disturbing aspect of this idea is Freidman’s apparent perception of the American people as only being interested in getting a job so we can have money to buy stuff. In his defense, this is a very popular ideal of the American identity, but it is not the kind of goal we should hold above all else and certainly not what we should be teaching our children.
It is also important to note that Freidman is pushing for the American people to do something which not everyone was made for, to lead. Being a manager or president is a
heavy responsibility that requires lots of work with very little recognition aside from a pay check. To lead is essentially to carry the concerns of all those who are under you and this is a task that very few are suited for. Should we start telling our kids, “you can do whatever you want when you grow up…on the weekends.” Friedman’s idea not only contradicts the ideological foundations of this country but also a later chapter in his book. In this later chapter Friedman encourages for a push in math and science. Are these jobs also untouchable? Or is that only if we become smarter than China and India? As a college student graduating with a degree in English, it is a very bleak, flat world that Thomas Friedman has painted for me.