If you are part of “My Generation” (unfortunately well north of 30) or older, you can probably relate to stories told by our parents who often made the claim that they “walked to school every day… in snowstorms….uphill…. both ways!”

I was reminded of these and other tall tales recently after picking up the excellent, highly acclaimed work of Tom Friedman titled “The World is Flat.” (Full disclosure: I have not mentioned it to my Mom because she might take offense and accuse me of calling her a liar).

The book is actually six years old but it is now in “version 3.0” as Friedman continues to evolve the content, which focuses on the 21^st century trend of globalization. Friedman picked the title, which is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field relative to what I have conveniently called the “four Cs” – commerce, computing, collaboration and communication.  One could argue there are other aspects too, but why ruin the alliteration?  One thing is indisputable – in a flat world, all competitors have an equal opportunity to disrupt existing businesses. In a flat world, time zones become irrelevant. Anyone can become a business partner, a customer, a collaborator.

While reading the book and admittedly I am snacking on it bit by bit, a few personal and professional experiences struck me as interesting, if not ironic.

One recent Saturday morning I was struggling mightily to install a new high speed wireless router at home. I spent the better part of two hours talking to tech support reps to fix the problem.  They were both based in India and at one point, one rep from Verizon was on my cell phone talking to the rep from Linksys on my home phone.  Together we finally fixed the problem. Certainly it was more convenient than scheduling a time with my local computer fix it guy and the “telephone guy.” And cheaper too – the “flat” fee was $10.

Two weeks later, from our BluePoint world headquarters office in Lexington, Mass., we had quite a morning:

8 am  – conference call with the CEO of a client in Noida, India

9:30 am – call with new client in London

10 am – call with client and its marketing team in Marseille, France

11 am – call with new business prospect in London

4 pm – email from new business prospect in Bangalore

A few years ago, this really would not have been something we could have envisioned: a truly global client base. When I described this scenario to my son that night, he asked me, “Dad, why are they doing business with your company from so far away?” My answer was simple: “because they can.”

My takeaway on all of this – I guess the world is flat. Both ways.

- Posted by Tim Hurley

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