Metaphor Mania: Flat World

So this Tom Fried man (the pun is in his name) guy visits the Infosys Bangalore campus, and on the way back home, imagines all kinds of wierd metaphors with twisted logic, and comes up with a book.

Now that the book itself has become a bestseller, Infy decides to jump onto the bandwagon, and starts blaring its trumpets at full volume -- describing itself as a so-called 'flat world' company and starting a company blog that churns out articles (read PR gimmickry under the name of a 'blog') of why only they can be a 'flat world' company. So much so, that they have made it their corporate mantra -- "Think Flat".



Okay let's start with the original work first.

The book "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman was published first in 2005 with the cover depicting a painting without the permission of its painter. The publishers then re-released it with a new cover in 2006.



To give you an idea of the genius that Friedman is, let me quote extensively from the reviews of the book.

For guaranteed reading pleasure, I strongly recommend you read the complete reviews (links below).

Excerpts from the New York Press Review of the book:

(I really wanted to give only excerpts here. But as you can see, I found the whole thing so damn interesting and funny that I could barely cut a few paragraphs out. Excuse the expletives.)

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name)

Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.

...

If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical approach. It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to invade a castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is now probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world is flat. .

Start with the title.

The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally f***ed. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa business class." When he reaches India—Bangalore to be specific—he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas."

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors.

God strike me dead if I'm joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the "ten great flatteners," which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: "Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual." These technologies Friedman calls "steroids," because they are "amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners."

According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from eating with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners existed already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree—a period of time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization 1.0 beginning with Columbus—they did not come together to bring about Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the help of the steroids, gone through their "Triple Convergence." The first convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in Friedman's favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came when new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial countries—India, Russia, China, among others—walked onto the playing field. Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are "not just walking" but "jogging and even sprinting" onto the playing field.

Now let's say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It could be any number, but let's be conservative and say two. The whole point of the book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman's first bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book). To get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them converge—let's say this means squaring them, because that seems to be the idea—three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add a few steroids in there, and we're dealing with a flattening factor somewhere in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We're talking about a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you're like me, you're already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For instance:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your uber-steroid-flattener-cake!

Let's speak Friedmanese for a moment and examine just a few of the notches on these antlers (Friedman, incidentally, measures the flattening of the world in notches, i.e. "The flattening process had to go another notch"; I'm not sure where the notches go in the flat plane, but there they are.) Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the f*** do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

Ha ha. And some form the review by the San Francisco Chronicle:

... Friedman's latest book, "The World Is Flat," is culturally misinformed, historically inadequate and intellectually impoverished. It is also a runaway best-seller.

The book's main point is that the world is "flattening" -- becoming more interconnected -- as the result of the Internet, wireless technology, search engines and other innovations. Consequently, corporate capitalism has spread like wildfire to China, India and Russia, where factory workers, engineers and software programmers are paid a fraction of what their American counterparts are paid.

Business reporters, labor activists, historians and anthropologists have reported these trends for more than a decade, but Friedman would have us believe that he single-handedly discovered the "flat world." In fact, without a trace of irony, he compares himself to Christopher Columbus embarking upon a global journey of exploration.

To awe his readers, Friedman relies upon anecdotes and vignettes from recent trips. He breathlessly recounts visiting booming Asian cities that he portrays as landscapes littered with American logos from IBM, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Pizza Hut. In Bangalore (India) and Dalian (China), cheerful CEOs and young high-tech workers explain how wonderful corporate globalization has been for them. Friedman gushes about golf courses and skyscrapers built by U.S. companies around the world; he raves about handheld gadgets that send faxes, snap photos and play MP3 tunes; and he reminisces about sushi bars in Dubai and Bentonville (the Arkansas home of Wal-Mart).

Not until the final chapters does he acknowledge that most Indians and Chinese still live in poverty. He never mentions that the gap between rich and poor in both India and China is widening. Nor does he dwell on the fact that many of the companies that have laid off thousands of Bay Area employees (Santa Clara County alone lost 231,000 jobs between 2000 and 2004) have replaced them with workers in Asia.

...

Toward the end of the book Friedman acknowledges that most of the global population does not live in a "flat world" -- and that many have no desire to do so. To explain this, he resorts to a facile explanation: culture. He argues that cultures open to foreign ideas (he really means open to corporate capitalism and mass consumption) will blossom in the 21st century, while closed cultures will wither.

Friedman's understanding of culture is simplistic and sloppy. He relies upon analogies rather than analysis, stereotypes rather than social science, and hearsay rather than history.

...

Friedman seems vexed by what he calls the "backwardness" of Arab and Muslim cultures. He writes, "For complicated cultural and historical reasons, many of them do not glocalize [absorb foreign ideas] well.'' Approvingly, he refers to economist David Landes, who argues that in the Arab Muslim world, "cultural attitudes have in many ways become a barrier to development."

This reveals a shocking ignorance of history. For seven centuries, Islam was the global civilization par excellence, and it enabled the development of many scientific, intellectual and artistic breakthroughs during that period.

Nowhere is the European (and American) colonization and occupation of the Arab and Muslim worlds over the last 200 years mentioned as a possible explanation for anger and resentment directed against the United States and Europe. Nowhere is U.S. government support of brutal dictatorships in the Middle East (from the shah to the Saudi royal family) offered as a possible reason for opposition to Western hegemony posing as "globalization" or a "flat world." In this book, history is bunk.

Friedman doesn't appear to spend much time outside of golf courses, five- star restaurants, limousines and luxury hotels. His view of the world is consistent with dozens of elites he interviews on his global journey. The chief executive officers of Fortune 500 companies, Mexican ex-presidents, U.S. secretaries of state and military generals, Japanese financial consultants and Indian and Chinese ministers of trade inhabit Friedman's flat world. The voices of farmers, factory workers and street vendors are heard nowhere in the text, though many might tell a different story -- of growing poverty, hunger and disease in the wake of World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization policies.

Ultimately, Friedman's work is little more than advertising. The goal is not to sell the high-tech gadgetry described in page after page of the book, but to sell a way of life -- a world view glorifying corporate capitalism and mass consumption as the only paths to progress. It is a view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace. It betrays a disregard for democracy and a profound lack of imagination.

This book's lighthearted style might be amusing were it not for the fact that his subject -- the global economy -- is a matter of life and death for millions. Friedman's words and opinions, ill informed as they are, shape the policies of leaders around the world. Many consider him to be a sophisticated thinker and analyst -- not a propagandist. It is a sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis gripping our society today.

Now, coming to the company that seems to think it has started the 'flat world' phenomenon.

For any concept to be used as a corporate mantra it has to be of the vision-setting, awe-inspiring, world-changing variety. Coming to the motivational value of the word "flat", a fellow blogger has this obeservation:

Meaning of "flat" from Answers.com.

• Lacking interest or excitement; dull: a flat scenario.
• Lacking in flavor: a flat stew that needs salt.
• Having lost effervescence or sparkle: flat beer.
• Deflated. Used of a tire.
• Electrically discharged. Used of a storage battery.
• Of or relating to a horizontal line that displays no ups or downs and signifies the absence of physiological activity: A flat electroencephalogram indicates a loss of brain function.
• Commercially inactive; sluggish: flat sales for the month.
• Unmodulated; monotonous: a flat voice
• Lacking variety in tint or shading; uniform: “The sky was bright but flat, the color of oyster shells” (Anne Tyler).
• Not glossy; mat: flat paint.
• Music - Being below the correct pitch.

And a reader rightly comments:

NASA is to Space,
Google is to Innovation,
Vint Cerf is to Internet,
Richard Stallman is to Open Source,
Jesse James Garrett is to AJAX,
Lakshmi Mittal is to Steel,
[and Bush is to War :-)],

what is Infosys's crediblity in talking about the Flat World? Could someone explain, please?

Is it that, Tom Friedman visited the Infosys campus in Bangalore and mentioned it in his book? I think the Western-style campus with lawn, golf course and swimming pool flattened him! Does this give Infosys any credibility to talk about the flat world concept?!

Another blogger rightly points out that the phrase 'Think Flat' infact sounds "like an advert for a Plasma TV Screen".

And the ARC writes,

Infosys Technologies had their annual analyst event in Boston on September 25th and 26th. The theme of the event was “Win in the Flat World,” a natural theme for a leading outsourcing company headquartered in India. At a high level, many of their comments would have been familiar to those who have read Tom Friedman’s best selling business book, “The World is Flat.” However, the company is trying to capitalize on this marketing windfall by doing research into what does a “flat world” mean in their core verticals? What activities in these verticals lend themselves to outsourcing? How will outsourcing in combination with reengineering impact Cash Flows, the Balance Sheet, and the Income Statement?

All of this is the kind of red meat you need to throw in front of analysts to show you are a thought leader, but in a candid conversation between Andy Chatha, ARC’s CEO, and Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys’s President and COO, Kris was willing to admit there may not be that much revenue that can be directly attributed to “flat world” work. Much of the conversation centered on how Infosys has achieved what they have achieved.

On the other hand, in a press conference announcing astounding quarterly results on 11 October, Infosys CEO and managing director Nandan Nilekani was quoted as saying "Our business model provides a compelling value proposition to clients in a flat world."

Let's take for example one of the recommendations by Infosys to its clients, as part of its four-point 'Think Flat framework' if I could say that:

Think Money from Information

In essence, companies should shift their operation priority:

Now, do they expect their clients to be so dim-witted as to miss the obvious catch -- that "Creating Seamless Information Flows" and "Building Strong Analytics Tools and blah blah" themselves mean huge investments of money, and Infy would only be too happy to milk them away for those 'Services'?

The Motley Fool has this commentary on the Infosys stock:

Infosys: Flat World, Flat Investment?

Nobody at Infosys came up with the phrase "flat world." Thomas Friedman invented the phrase and wrote a best-seller, weighing more than two pounds, called "The World Is Flat." Infosys adopted the phrase as a corporate mantra, and the stock has been exploding ever since. Fool contributor John Finneran explores whether the flat world is also a flat investment.

By John Finneran, CFA
October 13, 2006

In Thomas Friedman's ode to outsourcing, The World Is Flat, he credits Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani with coming up with the "flat world" phrase. Although Nilekani actually said the "playing field is being leveled," Friedman's rare exercise in saving words has paid off handsomely. Infosys adopted "flat world" as its corporate mantra, and the stock has appreciated 61% in the last year. And Friedman's book, which weighs more than two pounds and nudges 600 pages, has become a best-seller.

...

Infosys hired just 2% of the 1.4 million people who applied last year, and is reputed to have the largest training facility -- in the world.

Flat-worlders come to India

Friedman forgot that the flat world works both ways -- India can come to America, but America can go there, too.

Infosys is, like all its Indian IT peers, built on a fundamental labor arbitrage -- hire Indian IT staff at approximately one-sixth of their U.S. cost, and charge them to clients at the highest U.S. rate achievable. Chipping away at this advantage are the 20% wage inflation and high attrition rates in the Indian IT sector.

However, there is a faster way to level the playing field -- just hire more people in India and dilute the cost advantages of the native firms. Infosys has 66,000 total employees. In contrast, IBM has 43,000 employees in India, and plans to invest another $6 billion there over the next three years. Meanwhile, Accenture has 23,000 staff in India.

The New World of old work

India may be the New World for IT services, but the work outsourced there is distinctly Old World. There are few signs of New World revenue, such as the transformational outsourcing services offered by IBM and Accenture. Here's the evidence.

First, reviewing Infosys' revenues by service reveals that maintaining software applications is the largest slice, at 29% of total revenue. Now, this revenue has the advantage of being delivered under long-term contracts, but it is typically for tired "legacy" systems, offering little upside to the client or outsourcer.

Second, though Infosys has invested in a dedicated consulting arm, total revenue from consulting is abysmally low at less than 4%. Consulting is critical to an IT services firm, because it helps shape client agendas and generate larger amounts of work downstream for the outsourcing and software factories. In contrast, Accenture earns 55% of its revenues from consulting, and 45% from outsourcing.

Third, the traditional pricing model of charging by the hour for every staff member dominates at Infosys. This model, called time and materials, accounted for 74% of Infosys' revenues in its last quarter.

...

"Flat world" investors, stay home

The good news is that investors in the flat world can stay home. It is much easier for Accenture and IBM to replicate the India-driven global delivery model than it is for Infosys and Wipro to make the round trip. You just take out your big checkbook and hire away -- no leadership institutes shaped like spaceships required. On the other hand, replicating the long-standing, consulting-driven client relationships enjoyed by the global brand names in IT services is much, much harder.

Valuations make the case for staying at home even stronger. Accenture has eight times the revenue and its return on equity is a third higher, but it trades at half the enterprise value of Infosys.

The world is still round

Infosys is a great company, but that does not make it a great investment. Buying its stock means a full subscription to the story of 30% to 40% growth in sales and earnings over five to 10 years.

There are just too many pressures bringing Infosys' growth rate down. The frenzied hiring of staff by local and multinational firms will flatten the cost advantage in India, while the Indian firms will be slowed by the relationship and innovation assets held by firms like IBM and Accenture.

The world is still round!

But if the Infoscions and their investors still believe in the flat world, they have company:

The International Flat Earth Society in California advocates the flat-earth theory and "will provide you with materials and show you how to fight the evil humanistic belief that the earth is round with true evidence and Biblical information that shows otherwise."

In its publication, The Flat Earth News, under a regular column, "One Hundred Proofs Earth is Not a Globe", it had once published this thought-provoking and irrefutable proof:

"If the Earth were a globe, there certainly would be -- if we could imagine the thing, to be peopled all around-'antipodes:' 'people who,' says the dictionary, 'living exactly on the opposite side of the globe to ourselves, having their fee [sic] opposite to ours' - people who are HANGING DOWN, HEAD DOWNWARDS while we are standing head up? But since the theory allows to travel to those parts of the earth where the people are said to hand head downward, and still to fancy ourselves to be heads upwards, and our friends whom we have left behind us to be heads downwards, it follows that the WHOLE THING IS A MYTH - A DREAM - A DELUSION - and a snare, and, instead of there being any evidence at all in this direction to substantiate this popular theory, it is plain proof that the Earth is Not A Globe."

Alas, there's no Nobel prize for logic.