In this blog post, I would like to talk about the four “flatteners” Thomas L. Friedman discussed in his book “The World Is Flat.”

·         Supply-Chaining:  Friedman makes a comparison between the modern retail supply chain and a river. He gives us his best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping, which is Wal-Mart

·         Insourcing: “FedEx and UPS not just delivering packages anymore. They are synchronizing global supply chains large and small.”  Insourcing is when a company's employees perform services – “beyond shipping” – for another company.  Friedman uses UPS as the prime example.

·         In-Forming:  Yahoo, MSN Web Search, and mainly Google are examples of In-Forming. However, Friedman uses Google as the prime example.  As he says, "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago". Now people can get answers for any question they have in the world by simply writing it in Google search engine. From the creation of Goggle it has become possible and very easy to find so much information about so many things.

·         The Steroids: steroids are Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Besides the ten flatteners, Friedman gives "the triple convergence," three additional components that acted on the flatteners to create a new, flatter global playing field.

1.     Before 2000, the ten flatteners were semiautonomous from one another. However, around the year 2000, all the flatteners met in a point.  Each flattener improved the other flatteners; “the more one flattener developed, the more leveled the global playing field became.”

2.     After the appearance of the ten flatteners, businesses needed to collaborate horizontally instead of vertically, which means companies and people team up with other departments or companies to adjoin value creation or innovation.

3.     After the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries with Soviet economic model, such as India, China, Russia, and the nations of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia, started opening up their economies to the world. This enhanced horizontal collaboration. Friedman names the Convergence III as the most effective factor of determining politics and economics in the early 21st century.