Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid

            This week on The World is Flat, we dive into free trade, what is it? Why is it important? Also, what kind of personality makes a “new middler, and what skills does it take?”  Later we sit down with the distant relative of C-3pO, also known as CQ + PQ > IQ, learn about it and how it is important.

Free Trade    

            What the hell is free trade? This is something that I do not understand, so with the Friedman book and a little help from the internet, I will explain. Starting with an old friend, Wikipedia, definition is this: Free trade is a policy by which a government does not discriminate against imports or interfere with exports by applying tariffs (to imports) or subsidies (to exports) or quotas. Friedman expresses importance of free trade with his China-America story and explains how not only does it open up trade lanes and boost the world economy, using outsourcing and offshoring is now easier and creates more competition in the industry between companies. Friedman mentions because business had opened up the possibility of workers in other countries that competition has pushed Americans to keep up with that competition and stay educated in that job market or skill level. With the influence of a healthy American economy and outsourcing of these jobs it will push the lower level countries we acknowledge in free trade to improve their countries wages and thus improve their economy strengthening the overall world economy. Of course opening up the world market with the help of free trade has a major effect on the overall world economy.

The New Middle

            This book in my opinion keeps this explanation kind of vague so I will explain to the best of my deciphering abilities.

            A new middler is middle class jobs, only fewer. A worker that moves where the business is, especially in collaboration jobs in sales, marketing, maintenance, and management and these people will need to be a good horizontal collaborator and be willing to work comfortably with a global company. What skills and personality traits make a new middler? Friedman says that they have to be special or specialized, like Michael Jordan, or J.K. Rowling, they have to be localized or anchored, and they have to be in the middle class jobs and be willing to be flexible and constantly re-skilling or training themselves to new innovations and technologies that arise. In my opinion it would be beneficial to be very multilingual as well as multicultural to better understand the market you are doing business with. So to be multidimensional and multicultural is highly desired in a global workforce market. The question remains, how willing are you to move where the business moves if you have the desired skillset? My answer depends on two things before I would even consider the move, first would be how good is the pay? Really would it be worth it to make that move? Also, how it the environment where I would be making the move, is the area safe and how easy would it be to blend into that culture?

CQ + PQ > IQ

            CQ is curiosity quotient, PQ is passion quotient, and IQ is intelligence quotient. Friedman lives by the equation stated above and in Friedman’s words, he would rather take a person with the curiosity and the passion to learn or try something new over an intelligent person any day. I guess that is true because you could have someone who is very intelligent and with an ego to never learn something new as well as lazy and probably not get as much productivity out of him or her. A curious and passionate person is a self-motivator and self-educated, they have that drive, passion, and desire to learn and be a better person. I find that true to some of us in college. For example I will use myself, now in high school I found myself to be an intelligent person however I was lazy and failed miserably. I took a shot at college five years ago and realized all of the wonderful things a college can bring me, however it was trying times for myself and I dropped back. As I registered for classes I figured out that it does not matter what you know, but what you desire to learn, and how hard you are willing to work for that success. So this time around I am seriously challenging myself, it will be tough and I am sure I will fail, but I feel like to fail is to learn and I will just keep working at it to be successful. I am curious to learn new things, it will be a bitch to work at it, as well as hold a full time job, but I try to keep pushing myself to get that successful end result. To end this module I am pulling a quote from this book that I love as well as use it as my title for this blog, Friedman even states that it should be engraved on every doorway to every school in America, the quote is: “Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.”

Pissed over a B ticket.

Module 5

            Well after a much needed break I am back to reading the flat book, I must admit at first I wasn't much of a fan but the author has interesting perspectives and stories to back up his thoughts on the change in technology. I imagine with how fast this develops that much of what he is talking about in the book was already dated old news by the time it was published. Much like his airline ticket story, which is the inspiration for my title, technology and service can literally change overnight without much notice.

What is the Triple Convergence?

            The best way I can answer this question in how Friedman explains it one being a melding of all of the flatteners mentioned in this book up to this point, businesses and individuals alike adopted all of these and implemented them in their daily lives and some even streamlined most processes to get a better result, making business or daily life faster and more efficient. Second, of course being the streamlining and making better use of all of these flatteners in our daily business and personal lives, also that other major Asian and European countries making use of these flatteners and connecting with the western world like never before especially since the end of the Cold War. Third, now that this playing field is leveled out people started to realize the benefit of new technology, connecting, plugging in and playing, downloading and uploading. Friedman talks again about southwest realizing how the world has become tech savvy and the use of millions of networked computers had made it easier to deliver to the customer in a faster and more efficient manner. I would like to think of it today in a the game world as cloud gaming, a big thing that the video game industry is pushing this generation because even with all of the badmouthing between companies I think they could all agree that we are moving from a disc based age to a digital age in home entertainment. So with the use of the cloud I will soon have the ability to share my digital library with my gamer friends in an instant. I suppose this could be a good and bad thing, good being convenience, bad being creating ultimate laziness, soon enough I would not have to leave the couch.

India vs. Indiana

            This is a crazy story and interesting that it was something that had actually happened and I can see how politicians jumped on this like flies on shit just to play the blame game in their next campaign. Truth is there was a legal bid of a job to upgrade the states computer systems to prevent the outsourcing of Indiana jobs, and a major Indian company known for outsourced jobs had won the contract, talking about some bitter irony. Who exploited who? This was not that clear as he had left it to the reader. In my opinion, I don’t know how much India was the exploiter or the exploited, I suppose exploiter, and they exploited the taxpayer’s desire to save money, but doing that IT jobs were lost to India. I will admit this is a hard thing to read between the lines, I would almost say taxpayers were exploited by politicians desire to make one party look better, on one side you have the job creators, and the other the money savers.

Intellectual property and its importance

            What is intellectual property, by doing a little internet research here is a definition: a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as a manuscript or a design, to which one has rights and for which one may apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, etc. This is important because people are constantly sharing new creative ideas on the internet that can quickly be stolen and patent as another’s original work, so there are now laws to govern those properties from being stolen and passed off as someone else’s work, of course this happens a lot in writing classes, even though unethical, at some point a student gets pretty desperate for a good grade so at times will steal from someone else’s writing and pass as their own.

"flat, the world is"---Thomas Friedman

Module 4

            For this week’s entry I interviewed my friend Matt Roberts (Hi Matt.) Matt works for a company called Marketstar and is what’s called a SQL Database Report writer. I guess to better understand what my friend Matt does is to break down what Marketstar as a company is, and what SQL is.

            Marketstar is a part of the Diversified Agency Services (DAS) division of Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE: OMC). Omnicom is a global advertising, marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom’s branded networks and specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, interactive, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to more than 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries and of course Marketstar has offices here in Utah, most notably in Ogden right off of 25^th and Washington. This company holds contracts with the likes of Google, HP, LG, and Ricoh, to name a few. For example Google or these other companies outsources sales, or other marketing and data jobs to companies like Marketstar to handle most of their sales calls and organization among other things.

            SQL (pronounced sequel) short for Structured Query Language, of course I had to do my research to fully understand this computer jargon so from Wikipedia, is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system (RDBMS). SQL is a type of computer language or sequencing to organize different types of data and has been around for some time. Initially developed by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce of IBM in the early 1970’s was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in IBM's original quasi-relational database management system.

            With all of the computer lingo aside, I am going to quit boring you and move on to what my friend Matt actually does other than make sure his desk chair does not float away. That being said I will try to make this as interesting as I possibly can, God help us.

 Down in the depths of 25^th and Washington my friend Matt, and his other pimple popping comrades use this computer language to support a Market Analyst (MA.) Basically this hot shot MA comes to these dweebs requesting that they organize data received from clients to be better understood themselves or the rest of us. I had asked Matt, who I have since confirmed by shocking surprise is married, what SQL looked like and what his final result would look like. I did get a chance to see this but could not share his work so I have looked for myself to show you all an example.

To best put it with the work I do, seems that is the best way I understood it, I am a merchandiser and at the end of my reset or refresh of a bay or end cap of product in retail I send pictures and other finished data to corporate. All of this data is then stockpiled and organized by people like my friend Matt so those that do not understand that information can see in their native language. That being said I also get feedback in return asking about bay width, height and depth so the people at corporate offices can then organize another reset to be done and so far and so forth. In short Matt is the middle man that organizes that data for others to understand and use properly.

In a networking sense Matt does not deal with much other than making sure the main computer system does not get bogged down with too much data being sent and received, so others do not experience a lag in the computer network. To use the term flattening and explain how this job fits in that mix, being an outsourced, but necessary step, this career helps streamline the marketing and sales business and make it easier for google and the other companies above to understand and process that data.

"Ich werde meinen Kaffee flach, genau wie mein Mann."--Thomas L. Friedman

Module 3

       If you are confused by my new title, google translate German to English.

What Makes Offshoring different from outsourcing?

            I am going to have to use some examples to answer this question, first, what is the definition of outsourcing? Definition: to send away (some of a company's work) to be done by people outside the company. Basically if I own a company that produces a product with various parts that I can either produce within my company or I could contract with another company to make those smaller parts for my company and have them shipped so I can make my entire product. Of course I would want that particular step to be cheaper rather than make those parts myself. Another example would be finding a cheap plastic toy and noticing made in China printed on the bottom, the company that initially created that toy found it cheaper to have another company in China and pay those people less than half of what they would pay an American to make the same product here. Offshoring is similar in a way that instead of having a contract with another company to make that product for you, it would be your own company going to another place and have them manufacture that product by building and financing the project itself. My example would be Toyota, this is a company based in Japan, but instead of building cars in Japan and having them shipped here to the states. The company then builds its own production facilities and hires its own employees here in the states to build their cars. Companies do this to keep business within the company but also avoid if not lower shipping costs.

Supply Chains and Wal-Mart herpes

            Supply Chaining: the sequence of processes involved in the production and distribution of a commodity. Basically, an ongoing cycle of a product being produced, packaged, shipped to DC, branched out to stores, sold to a consumer, and repeat. Walmart uses this weapon to keep supply up with demand, Freidman explains this from the point of distribution, starting from a Walmart DC product is received from the manufacturer, sorted and packaged in various trucks to go to multiple stores across the country depending on stores demand. Once the consumer purchases said product a signal is transmitted to the manufacturer to make that product and it eventually makes it back to the DC and repeat, but on a much larger scale. Walmart benefits from this to keep shelves stocked and to keep up with the consumer purchasing those items. Walmart does this to help keep prices a bit lower than the competition, of course this has gotten the company into trouble in the past.

Through the eyes of Google

            I use google, you use google, we all use google, anyone remember ask Jeeves? It’s still around, just google it! But how has google affected businesses? Well google, or any search engine, informs people. Its your one stop shop for all of the information in your local library and beyond, all at your fingertips. What google has done to pay for itself and keep it free for us is advertising, letting companies plaster their logo all over as you searched for information of relevance.  By doing this google is paid and kept free to the public, in most cases a typical search links to a company for some sort of product or service you are looking for, thus strengthening said business. Having that power of information had put written text out of such relevance in today’s world. For example, now with the use of a smart phone or a computer, any one person can search for whatever they need, faster than looking up in an encyclopedia, or even the yellow pages.

To recap, Offshoring is a way for a company to create product in another part of the world and keep the production in house. Walmart uses supply chains to keep shelves stocked in a timely manner and google holds the worlds information at our fingertips, including businesses, so be careful when you are calling your boss a douchebag, google search your name and Facebook and they would probably find that post resulting in your termination. Of course with all of that cheap online advertisements, businesses are well known thanks to google. Whether you are settling an argument, looking for a place to eat, finding porn to self-indulge on a lonely Monday evening, or even looking for a friend’s house on maps. Google is there, to please the masses.

“Honey, does this shirt make me look flat?”—Thomas Friedman

Module 2

            If my titles seem a little ridiculous I apologize, but for how many times Friedman refers to a flat world it seems a little redundant, and I would like to continue that redundancy.

            Workflow Software

            Workflow software is something that was developed back in the 90’s while the internet was on the rise. In its beginning stages it was mostly connected pc’s and emails and of course was a way to connect throughout a company or even just in the office. For example in a doctor’s office keeping patients files saved on a network computer hub other physicians and nurses can upload and download those files thus making the business practice in a health care center more efficient, and of course as the companies would expand so would this network of sharing, connecting and emailing. I mentioned a form of this in my last module as the company I work for is Lowes and we in fact have a similar sort of set up through our employee portal, Lowes.net. I mentioned a small portion of this run through IBM called connections, this program is very similar to Facebook in a way that I have my own profile and connect with anyone in the company and we also post project information for all employees to see through blogs and wiki’s. The other parts of Lowes.net help me manage my payroll, health care, job search, work list, and email’s and other Lowe’s news related articles are also posted there. Lowes.net is also interconnected with or genesis POS system so tracking and selling orders for customers can be taken care of in a somewhat seamless manner. We also have design tools to better serve our customers such as the deck building design tool, which with the right measurements, and what product the customer desires, we can design the deck, have a 3D rendering of the deck, and have a list of materials for the customer so they can have a price and location of all materials for them to purchase. Friedman mentions workflow software as being an unnoticed but revolutionary. I could not agree more because with my generation, this is something that we have always had but has developed and gotten better over time and I could not imagine not having these tools and using paper and snail mail.

Open Sourced Software

            Open sourced software (OSS) is also known as community-developed software, is a way for freelance engineers to collaborate and develop software. Truthfully anyone can add to this software and make it better a good example would be the operating system Linux. Linux has various flavors developed by a multitude of software geeks to create or better the platform. Basically online communities that come together and somewhat volunteer to create software and share it in what is called “freeware”. I didn’t know much of Linux or any OSS type software growing up, as I got older I heard more about it through learning about Linux and in today’s environment people use this to develop for android and the apple marketplace. I have since learned about a site called www.xda-developers.com/‎ and through this site there are blogs and wikis to teach me how to root my smart phone or tablet to better work for me. Again, I relate to this with my connections post, I find this very important with today’s life because we can constantly share and update this information where it will be always available.

Outsourcing

            Outsourcing is contracting out of a business process to a third party. I had known what outsourcing was but had to look up the definition to answer what outsourcing was. In Friedman’s book he goes on more in depth of explaining what outsourcing is by using India as an example, and that they train much of their population in school to learn these technical trades in computers and software IT. Thus, jobs had been outsourced to many Indians with their technical trade being in much use. This had been important because it has increased technical expansion in our world and flattening it even more. These are jobs that are in areas that are little known in the United States but specifically trained for in India and if you haven’t noticed by now whenever you make an IT phone call on one of your electronic products, more than likely that on the other line you are connected to a citizen in India. This also came to be more important during the Y2K bug was on the horizon, India had the man power and the knowledge to remedy the software glitch that could in theory crippled our computers because each computer at the time had its internal time clock to end on the eve of 12/31/99 and restart the next morning as 01/01/00 not reading it as the year 2000 but the year 1900. Thanks to outsourcing, what could have been crisis, had been avoided.

Module 1: "I'll have a Coke, make it flat please." ---Thomas Friedman

Before I started this book I did not understand the term Globalization fully, I assumed it had something to do with international trade but soon realized in Friedman’s words, in a technological sense, that the world is becoming smaller or the analogy he uses is becoming more flat. Friedman mentions three major events since Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Globalization 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

 Globalization 1.0 is an event that Friedman explains had started when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Columbus had discovered the new world, finding new land, new things to export and new people to rape, pillage, and steal land from and this eventually lead to expansion. Globalization 1.0 created nationalism, at this time every eastern country was pushing to be bigger than its opposition and started showing off the brawn that one another had and how effective each nation could use it in the means of expansion, brawn meaning muscle power or eventually wind and steam power.

On to Globalization 2.0 which spanned from the late 1800 to 2000, a key factor in shrinkage this time around would be the industrial revolution, and eventually the invention of the PC and on to the internet and thanks to the things that made it possible such as satellites and fiber optic cables that span all over and around our planet today. The major wars of this century or so (as well as the Great Depression) had interrupted this progression but around the 60’s or 70’s it was steadfast onto total shrinkage, ladies and gentlemen there was no blue pill to fix what was happening here. I actually did find it brain numbing to realize that when Clinton was elected president, only government officials had email but once Netscape became a big thing, it eventually was a household thing for everyone to have email and of course companies used this to further globalize and connect around the world which is the major difference between 2.0 and 1.0.

Onto globalization 3.0, this is a time in which we currently are experiencing and a major difference is now, thanks to the internet, I can connect with anyone around the world in a matter of seconds whereas just a hundred or so years ago telegram, which would take days, was the best method to pass on a message of course other than the Morse code which people were quick to replace with the telephone, I wonder why? The difference between 3.0 as to the previous events is character, now with YouTube and others like Facebook, twitter, or even a blog like this, I can broadcast myself to the world connecting with anyone and everyone. Companies also jumped on board utilizing email and creating their own forms of communication. I work for Lowe’s and in the last two years they have created something called connections powered by IBM that much like Facebook or even Canvas I can upload pictures, share, and connect with others in the company in an instant relating to problems and solving them together as an entire company, I myself can connect with any employee even the president and CEO of the company using this tool. That being said I am sure Lowes is not the only company to change, they in fact realize they have to change to stay relevant in an ever changing society, and to better serve customers in many ways including special orders and delivery. Their business model is changing from not only a brick and mortar big box store, but also to a major online retailer to compete with their second biggest threat, Amazon.

The forces of flattening, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. To Friedman the fall of the Berlin wall was an enormous event that opened up the world and catapulted everyone forward. It seems even in studying history it’s not hard to notice after 1989 the huge leap in technology and communication, and in turn the global economy grew because of this, a sort of ripple effect weakened the communist government above and gave the control back to the people, everyone has a choice and now can learn and share with everyone on the planet (excluding North Korea, but we are working on that) actually that is a funny thought, when or if North Korea joins the pack, will this start Globalization 4.0? I imagine it would pair with another major advance in technology much like the fall of the wall, the discovery of the internet, and a Windows PC in every household.

The story of Netscape and the relation to the flattening process is especially important because it connected those who could afford and purchased a PC. There was a lot you could put down in digital form but with the internet and help from Netscape, it allowed us to share that digital content thus being largely important in launching the digital age, in which we live today.