Chapter 11 Chapter 3 Triple Confluence (2)

The same thing is happening today as the world flattens.Many of the 10 factors that flatten the world have been around for many years, but for them to be fully effective, we need not only the convergence of the 10 factors, but also something else.Legions of managers, innovators, consultants, business schools, designers, IT specialists, CEOs, and workers need to adapt and develop the various forms of horizontal collaboration, value creation processes, and habits that can take advantage of this flat world.Simply put, the confluence of the 10 factors also brings together various business practices and skills, and the two begin to reinforce each other.

"When people ask, 'Why didn't the IT revolution lead to a rapid increase in productivity right away? 'That's because you don't just need new computers, you need new business processes and the new technology to go with them.New ways of doing business make information technology precious, and information technology makes new ways of doing business possible. “Globalization 2.0 is indeed the era of mainframe computers, everything is vertically managed—command and control, and companies and their subdivisions are also vertically organized. Globalization 3.0 is formed by the combination of 10 flattening factors, especially personal The combination of computers, microprocessors, networks, and fiber-optic cables has transformed the playing field from a vertical top-down to a horizontal left-to-right. This naturally necessitates the promotion of new business models where command and control give way to liaison and cooperation.

HP CEO Carly.“Our requirements for value creation have evolved from vertical to horizontal command,” explains Fiorina, who says innovation at companies like HP is increasingly coming from horizontal collaboration across different departments and teams around the world.For example, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, and Nokia recently collaborated to develop a camera phone that can send digitized pictures to an HP printer, where they can be quickly printed.Each company has cutting-edge technology in its respective field, but only when all three companies combine their cutting-edge technology levels can they add value.Fiorina added: "Horizontal collaboration and management requires completely different skills than the traditional top-down approach."

Let me give a few examples.Over the past five years, HP has grown from a company with 87 different supply chains—each managed vertically and independently, with its own top management and back office support—to a company that can manage 500 with just five supply chains. It is a company with a billion-dollar business, and accounting, human resources and other functions are also under the unified control of the headquarters. Southwest Airlines took advantage of the confluence of these 10 factors to create a system that allows customers to download check-in boarding passes at home.But until I adjusted my personal ticketing habits and gradually adapted to the level of cooperation with Southwest Airlines, this technological breakthrough did not bring me or Southwest Airlines a major breakthrough in productivity.

Bizhub's advertisement reflects the difference between employees who know how to use the new Bizhub machines and employees in the same office who do not understand this technology. Only when the latter also change their work habits can the productivity of the entire office be improved. The new machines already existed in the office. Finally, let's take WPP, the world's second largest advertising and marketing communications giant, as an example. The British company 20 years ago was very different from today.It is the result of the merger of industry leading advertising agencies Young & Rubicam, Ogilvy & Mather and Hill & Knowlton.This merger is in response to the marketing needs of a growing number of large clients, such as advertising, direct mail, media buying and branding.

Allen, director of Wave Brand Consulting Design Company, a subsidiary of WPP."WPP's big challenge for many years has been getting its companies to work together, but now it's not enough just to work between companies," Adamson said. "We often pull people from each company to provide a solution for a client. Forming bespoke partnerships. These often individualized services cannot be provided by any one firm or traditional partnerships with those firms. We had to go down to the whole group and pick the right advertising people, the right branding people and the right people for that client. media personnel."

When General Electric decided to spin off its insurance business in 2003 and set up an independent insurance company, WPP specially formed a working group to be responsible for the whole service from naming the new company (named Genworth) to the first advertising and marketing publicity.Adamson said: "As a leader in this organization, you need to analyze the special needs of each customer, and then find the right professionals to provide services to them among WPP's employees, and then form a virtual special service company for customers. In When serving General Electric, we even had a name for this purpose-built virtual collaborative team: Klamath Communication .” As the world flattens, WPP has adjusted its office structure and approach to maximize benefits , like those who converted steam plants to electric plants in the early days of electrification.However, WPP not only knocked down the next door to the office, but also punctured the floor between the floors.It regards all the employees of the subordinate companies as a huge pool of individual experts, and according to the specific needs of the project, they are combined horizontally into a cooperative team, which can become a de facto new company with its own name.

Horizontal thinking applies to everything from business to education to military planning.Shifting from thinking vertically to thinking horizontally requires adjustment, as WPP has done.Because vertical thinking often requires you to start by asking who controls what system, not what output or effect you want to create. For example, let’s say I’m a general in Iraq, and the effect I want to create is better real-time intelligence on the battlefield. If this is true, then my first priority is not whether I control the reconnaissance aircraft that hover over the battlefield and take aerial photos.No, my first priority was to find a way to analyze the photos sent back by the spy planes as deeply and quickly as possible.When this becomes my top priority, I start thinking horizontally.

I started thinking about how to use the platform of the flat world, that is, how can I use my own network, or the network of the network, once I get the photo from the spy plane, feed it back to the CIA, DIA, NSA, army intelligence agencies , Air Force intelligence computer screens, and then put all the analysts together in a chat room and have them type in what they see and what threats they think they face, and since the chat and the video are synchronized, we can Let's analyze together.In this approach, I move away from thinking vertically, that I as the armed forces control the reconnaissance aircraft, so my analysts have to analyze the footage and then tell the military what we found.On the contrary, since the effect I want is the most timely and intelligent analysis, the method I use to obtain this effect is to horizontally connect different nodes in the entire network.Because all of us are smarter than any one of us, my priority is not who controls the footage, but how to create a horizontal feedback system to distill the most important intelligence for all of us to understand What does the video actually show.

It will take a certain amount of time for the core business model of the new competitive venue to be truly united, and it is still in progress.But I also have a small caveat, it's happening much faster than you can imagine, and it's a global trend. Remember, this is the process of triple confluence! The third major convergence is just as we create this new and more level playing field, companies and individuals in the West quickly adapt to this new thing, and 3 billion people who have been excluded before suddenly find that they can Feel free to compete and collaborate with others.

Except for a very small number, these 3 billion people have never been allowed to compete and cooperate before.I mean China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asian countries, most of which only started to open up in the 1990s, and since then people in these places have started to join the game of free markets more and more freely.When did these 3 billion people converge with the new competitive field and the new work process?Just when the world is flattened, when millions of people can compete and cooperate on a more equal and level basis, when they have access to more cheap tools.Indeed, the flattening of the world allows these people to join the fray without leaving their homes. Top 10 Factors That Make Competing Places Come To Them! I believe the confluence of these three forces—new competitors developing new processes and fostering new habits for horizontal cooperation on new playing fields—was the most important force shaping the global economic and political landscape of the early 20th century.Giving so many people access to all these collaborative tools, allowing them to receive initial information from billions of web pages via search engines and the web, ensures that the next generation of innovation will come from across the flat world.The scale of the future global community involved in all kinds of inventions will be unprecedented. During the Cold War, there were only three major trading blocs in the entire world—North America, Western Europe, and East Asia (led by Japan), and since they were allies in the same trench, competition among the three was relatively limited.Moreover, there were still many obstacles to global labor mobility and industry competition at the time, and the wage levels, education levels, and workforce sizes of the three major trading blocs were all evenly matched.Intel's chairman Craig."We used to have a suave playing field," Barrett said. Then began the triple confluence, the Berlin Wall fell and the Berlin High Street was built.All of a sudden, the three billion people who were walled off stepped onto this flattened global square. Harvard University economist Richard. A research report released by B. Freeman in November 2004 stated that the "global economic world" in 1985 included North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Latin America, Africa, and East Asia. The population of business cooperation) is about 2.5 billion.By 2000, due to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the market economic reforms in India and China, the people of these countries have also joined the army of international business and trade cooperation. Coupled with the natural population growth during this period, the total population of the global economic world has reached 60 100 million. With the total population of the economic world growing, about 1.5 billion new workers have joined the global labor force, Freeman said, which makes the total global labor force exactly double what it would be without the former Soviet Union, China and India. Perhaps only 1/10 of this new workforce of 1.5 billion has the education and communication skills to compete and collaborate directly, but even that 10% is equivalent to the overall size of the U.S. workforce.craig.Barrett said: "The sudden addition of 3 billion people will inevitably have a huge impact on the global economy, especially when these people come from countries with long educational traditions such as India, China, and Russia." This is absolutely true.The societies we're merging into all place a high value on education.Check out this story in Education Week, the weekly newspaper for US school teachers.In the November 30, 2005 issue of the newspaper, a special report on the Indian middle class was published.The report that marks India begins: "In Chennai, the capital of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, In one of the ubiquitous remedial classes, hundreds of 12th graders poured into a purple room about 30 feet long and 25 feet wide.Despite the constant whirling of the overhead fan, the temperature in the room reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is sleep-inducing.On a wooden podium, Muthukrishnan Arulselvan drew a triangle on a blackboard, indicating its internal angles, and then explained a geometric formula through a microphone.The students listened intently, even though it was close to 10 p.m.Whenever Arusefan asked a question, the students quickly answered in unison.Every time a teacher writes out a question, they bury their heads in their notebooks, bite their pencils, and hope they can get the answer before everyone else.The intensive, 7-day-a-week workshop mirrors the daily lives of Indian high school students hoping to gain entry to local schools in Chennai for their engineering degrees. .When they get home, most of them will drink a cup of strong sweet coffee, so that they can study for a few more hours.. In India, sending a child to engineering or medical school, for many middle class families It is a lifetime goal in a way that Americans know almost nothing about.In this country that invented the decimal system, such as S. Ramanujan (Srinivasa Ramanujan) and Aryabhatta This long-dead mathematical and technological genius is still revered, and children who do well in these fields will receive special rewards. "In 2004 and 2005, according to the Institute of International Education, India sent more students to universities in the United States than any other country in the world. According to the IIE, the number of students enrolled in the United States India accounted for 80,466 of the foreign university students, followed by China with 62,523 and South Korea with 53,358. Most of these students are studying business, engineering, mathematics or computing. India is a far away country, a very different culture, and it is not easy to come from that far. It can be seen that Indian students must have a strong thirst for knowledge.In fact, a large number of new players from India, China and the former Soviet Union not only stepped into the flat world arena, but also full of desire to learn to win the competition. And this is why the Triple Confluence does not happen slowly.It develops very rapidly.Because once the world has flattened and more and more people are able to engage in new forms of cooperation, the winners will be those who can learn habits, processes and skills the fastest, and there is no guarantee that Americans or Western Europeans will ever The position is at the forefront.Keep in mind that these new players entered the playing field with ease, that is, while they were previously far behind the developed world, this is precisely what allows them to adopt new technologies directly without fear of falling under the old system. sunk cost problem.They will adopt advanced technology very quickly, which is why China has more mobile phone users than the United States.Many Chinese have already skipped using landlines.In other words, many Chinese have completed the transition from having no phones to having mobile phones within 10 years. In the spring of 2005, I co-taught a course on globalization at Harvard University.One day after class, a student approached me and told me this story: He and his Harvard classmates formed a student organization with Chinese students.They help each other with everything from writing resumes to taking part in study programs.The interesting thing, he said, is how they communicate with each other.They use Skype, a software that enables free calls based on Internet technology.But the more interesting thing to me is that it is Chinese students who introduce American students to use Skype. And he pointed out that most of those Chinese students are not from big cities, but from small and medium-sized towns all over China. We generally believe that the International Monetary Fund, the G8, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and various trade agreements are the factors that promote global economic and trade cooperation.I don't deny the role of these official agencies, but what I want to say is that their role is increasingly weakened.The future of globalization will be driven by individuals who understand the flat world and who can quickly adapt to the procedures and technologies of the new world—without any treaty or advice from the IMF.They will come from all corners of the world. The world economy will henceforth depend less on the deliberations of finance ministers and more on dynamic zippies.Yes, we grew up with hippies in the 1960s, and many became yuppies in the 80s.Now let me introduce the "quickie". "Here are the jipps," said an article in India's weekly Outlook magazine, referring to the first batch of young people to grow up in India after it left socialism and directly embraced global trade and information revolutions. The Lookout calls these people the "kids of liberalism," defining them as "urban or suburban, 15- to 25-year-olds with the energy to make big strides. Belonging to Generation Z. Can be engaged in Male or female studying or working with a maverick attitude, ambition and desire. Calm, confident and creative. Challenge seeking, adventurous and fearless.” Indian jerkys are never shy about earning and spending money . "Outlook" quoted an analyst as saying, "They are moving towards their goals, do not believe in fate, are extroverted, have a positive attitude towards life, and are unwilling to live a life that remains unchanged." 54% of Indians are under the age of 25, or about 555 million people, which means that 60% of Indian households have at least one potential jerk in their households. Not only do these people desperately need good jobs, they also want a good life. It all happened so fast.Kanaan, CEO and founder of Indian call center company 24/7 Customer, told me that over the past 10 years, he has grown from worrying about getting a job in the United States to becoming a leader in outsourcing services to the United States. soldier.He recalled: "I will never forget the situation when I applied for the US visa. It was March 1991. I had already obtained my undergraduate degree as a certified public accountant from the National Institute of Certified Public Accountants of India. I was 23 years old and my girlfriend was 25 years old. I am 20 years old and she is also a CPA. I have been working for Tata Consulting for several years after graduating from university at the age of 20, and so has my girlfriend. We found a job opportunity to work as a programmer for IBM in the United States through a headhunting company, so we I went to the U.S. Consulate in Mumbai. At that time, there were many people applying to go to the U.S., and many people often queued up late at night. In order to occupy a seat, they slept on the ground at night. Rupees. But we decided to do it on our own, we stood in the middle of the line and finally got the chance to meet the interviewers whose job it was to ask us questions to determine if we were immigrant. There was often a sort of mystery to their judgment , we used to call it 'gambling' - everything you have is tied to it." In fact there are many books and seminars in India dedicated to how to prepare for a work visa interview at the US embassy. Working in the US was at the time the only way for technically savvy Indian engineers to really use their talents.Kanaan said: "One of the tricks I remember was being formal, so me and my girlfriend were wearing our best clothes. After the interview, the visa officer will not tell you anything, and you have to wait until the evening to know the result.We spent the whole day waiting in agony.To distract ourselves, we went shopping on the streets of Mumbai.We walk up and down the street, 'What if I can go and you can't?What if you can go and I can't? 'I can't tell you how anxious we were because everything was decided by it, it was a struggle. In the evening we learned that we both got visas, but I got a 5-year multiple-entry visa and my girlfriend got a 6-month visa.She cried because she thought she would only be in the US for 6 months.I tried to explain to her that as long as I could go, everything would be easy. " Although many Indians now still want to come to the US to work and study, in the case of triple convergence, many of them can get decent jobs and good income by staying at home.In a flat world, you don't have to emigrate to innovate."My daughter has never had to push that hard," Kanaan said. "In this flat world, there is no visa officer who can keep you out of the system ... It's a world where there is equal competition everywhere. "Because now you don't have to immigrate to innovate, and more and more world-class innovation, especially in software, is now coming from Indians working locally in India.This not only makes Indians willing to stay in the country, but also attracts people from other countries. P. Anandan, an Indian-American, is a software engineer who used to work for Microsoft in Redmond. He returned to India in 2005 and started a business in Bangalore. Microsoft Research Center.Alandan told me that I have two foreigners working for me, one is Japanese and the other is American, and they can work anywhere in the world.He added that when he got his engineering degree in India 28 years ago, the whole competition was to get a job overseas.The fiercest competition right now is to get an IT job in India: it's not what it used to be.Yes, I have to stay here, but is there a chance I can stay here? Let me introduce you to one of India's most dynamic doers - Rogersey.Rao, founder and CEO of Dhruva Interactive, a small gaming company in Bangalore.If I had to recommend you one person who embodies the triple confluence, it would be Rao.He and his company showed us how the Indian jerky changed under the influence of 10 factors. Dhruva is located on a quiet street in a residential area of ​​Bangalore.When I went to visit, I found Indian game designers and artists working on two floors above the computer, designing various games and animation characters for American and European clients.They listen to music through headphones while working, and occasionally play online games together during breaks. Dhruva has developed and produced a number of innovative games - from a game of tennis that can be played on a mobile phone to a game of pool that can be played on a computer or laptop. In 2004, the company also bought the patent to use Chaplin's image in computer games. That's right -- a new breed of Indian gaming company can now use Chaplin's image in computer games. In Bangalore and in subsequent email exchanges, I asked Rao, who was in his early 30s, how he had risen from Bangalore to become a major player in the global gaming industry. The diminutive Rao, with a mustache and always reminiscent of a heavyweight boxer, said: "My first big moment was in the early 1990s. Although I had studied and lived in Europe a lot. For a long time, but my choice is very clear, I will not leave India. I hope to be based in India, here to accomplish things that will be respected in the world and bring about change in India. On March 15, 1995, I Started my own company in Bangalore with no one else but me. My father provided me with funds to get me a bank loan, with which I bought a computer and a 14.4kbp modem, and I started working on Developing multimedia applications for education and industry. By 1997, we were a team of 5 and although we had made some achievements in the industry, we still felt that what we were doing was not challenging enough. This was the end of the Dhruva 1.0 era. " "In March 1997, we partnered with Intel and started to transform into a game company. By mid-1998, we told gamers all over the world that Dhruva could design games or develop parts of games that others outsourced. 1998 We signed our first major game development project with the French game company Infogrames on November 26, 2009. Although we did a lot of work, the results were never published. It was a huge blow to us, but it also showed the quality of our work, so we survived.The lesson from this incident is: we can do this, but we have to be smart.We have to reposition, this is the end of the era of Dhruva 2.0. " This led to the beginning of the Dhruva 3.0 era - positioning Dhruva as a game development service provider. The video game industry has reached a considerable scale, and its annual revenue even exceeds that of Hollywood. This industry has long had a tradition of outsourcing the design of game tasks to countries such as Canada and Australia.Rao said: "In March 2001, we launched a new game sample 'Saloon' (Saloon), its theme is to reflect the wild west of the United States, the background is in a small town salon, the waiter is cleaning after closing ...We've never seen a real salon before, but we use the web and Google to see and feel a real salon. Our choice of topics is deliberate because we want our potential clients in the US and Europe to believe that Indians can' do Well that's all'. The sample game was well-received, it got us a lot of outsourcing, and we've been a successful company ever since.” Could he have done all this 10 years ago, before the world went flat?Rao said, "No." Many conditions need to be met at the same time.The first is that broadband must be available to a certain level so that he can email his American customers about the game and how to use it, and also receive their feedback. The second condition is the promotion of personal computers in businesses and homes, and people must get used to using computers to complete a series of tasks."PCs are ubiquitous, and so is India today," he said. The third condition is the emergence of workflow software and web applications such as Windows, Outlook, NetMeeting and 3D Studio Max, which make Dhruva poised to become a small multinational.But the presence of Google is crucial."It's beautiful," Rao said. "For our Western clients, the question they really want to know is, 'Can you Indians understand the nuances of our culture?' To a large extent, this It's not unreasonable to be skeptical. But the advent of the web allows us to put together disparate content at the touch of a button, today if someone asks you to make something that looks like, you can 'Google' it and you'll get Countless pictures, information, commentary and touting articles about it." Rao explained that while the focus was on the growth of the online economy, real change was happening: People around the world were using the new infrastructure."We're starting to feel the efficiencies of using these facilities," he said. "When more and more people go paperless and don't worry about distance, we can improve these infrastructures even more. . It will make a big difference in the world.”