Thursday, October 04, 2007
How Does UPS Make The World Flat?
As I was reading a few passages from Thomas L. Friedman’s book “The World Is Flat” and I don’t understand why or how the world is flat. Well maybe I do. He lists 10 reasons the world has become flat and the one I really read into was reason # 8, which is Insourcing. In short, insourcing is the opposite of outsourcing which im sure most of us are familiar with. Friedman talks about UPS and how they have synced up the world. I was amazed to learn that UPS does much more then just ship a package; they have many distributing centers with the products in them ready to go. I was under the impression that when you bought an item, that item had to be shipped to USP then to you but I was wrong. UPS has worked together with many companies to help them with there distribution of products, this helps take some of the burden of shipping products to buyers off smaller and even larger companies. If the products are already at a UPS warehouse then they can just be shipped right away. To just get an idea of how much product UPS basically controls on a daily basis, take a look at this…
On any given day, according to UPS, 2 percent of the world’s GDP can be found in UPS delivery trucks or package cars. (Friedman 173)
I get the basic idea in this passage about UPS becoming one large distributor of all sorts of products but I don’t understand how it contributed to the world being flat. Now I haven’t read the rest of the book so maybe the answer is in there but as of right now my best guess is this…these new technologies are linking the world together so much, that there is really no boundaries for anything anymore, and the world being flat means that everything is streamline.
Labels: The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman, UPS
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Is Challenge a Good Thing?
" Tom, the playing field is being leveled."
And with that sentence, Thomas Friedman was challenged with a thought.
"America was going to be challenged, but, he insisted, the challenge would be good for America becuase we are always at our best when we are being challenged."
America was not going to be challenged physically via war or anything like that. We were going to be challenged technically. We were being challenged by other countries, including India, who would now be able to compete for global work knowledge like they have never been able before. We were going to be challenged by other countries who have never been able to challenge us before and this was going to be something new to both us and them and, according to Nandan Nilekani, we would be fine because "we are always at our best when we are being challenged." Well, are we? Sure, we are probably the strongest and most powerful nation in the world today but how often do we as a nation get challenged for anything? Sure with things in the past such as wars and situations like this, we've been able to rise up but look at other things that have happened. Questionable decisions have been made in the past such as the one that has us still in war right now, the nuclear war that wasn't but was on the verge of happening, etc. The United States has risen up in the past in challenging situations, but to say that we're at our best when a challenge is proposed, I'm not to sure about.
Labels: Challenge, Nandan Nilekani, Thomas Friedman
