Chapter 14 Chapter 4 Great Rectification (2)

Yes, let's clear our minds! From command and control to cooperation and connection in former US Secretary of State Colin.Before Powell left office, I went to interview him on the seventh floor of the US State Department building, accompanied by two of his media advisers.I couldn't resist asking him when he realized the world had become flat, and he answered in one word: "Google." text, he will ask his deputy to help him find the material, and it often takes minutes or even hours to wait for this. "But now I just Google 'UN Security Council Resolution 242' and the text comes up."

He also explained that he found himself doing more and more research studies independently every year.At this time, a media consultant next to him said: "Yes, he no longer asks us to help him find information. He already has the information, and he came to us to take action." A deputy revealed that Powell, a former AOL board member, also used email frequently to communicate with foreign ministers of other countries, including the British Foreign Secretary Jack at the summit.Straw used instant messaging to keep in touch as if they were college classmates.Powell said cellphones and wireless technology made it impossible for any foreign minister to hide from him.In the week before I interviewed him, he had been looking for Russia's foreign minister.

He dialed first the Russian foreign minister's cell phone number in Moscow, then his cell phone number in Iceland, and then his cell phone number in Laos."We have cell phone numbers for every foreign minister," Powell said. The takeaway I take from all these stories is that when the world flattens, it's not just the little people who can do big things that level the hierarchy, but the big people who can do small things - and they can accomplish more by themselves .There is one more thing that really touched me a lot.One of Powell's media advisers, a young woman, said to me as she escorted me out of the office after the interview that a BlackBerry (a wireless email receiver) made it possible for Powell to reach her and her email at any time. boss.

"I can't get rid of this guy at all," she joked. Because Powell was always emailing her instructions, when she was shopping with friends at the mall the previous weekend, she suddenly received a text from the Secretary of State. Instant message her to do some public relations tasks."My friends are all amazed. I'm talking to the secretary of state!" she said. This is what happens when you move from the vertical world (command and control) to the more horizontal world (collaboration and connection).In addition to your boss being able to do his own things, he can also do the work that belongs to you.He can be the secretary of state or his own secretary.He can give you instructions, day or night.

If these bosses want to, they can work more directly with more employees than ever before, no matter who those employees are or where they are in the hierarchy.But employees also have to work harder so they can get more information than their bosses.Today, the conversation between boss and employee will be greatly increased: "I already know! I Googled it myself." The Disorder of Multiple Identities In a flat world it is not just societies and corporations that need to adjust to multiple identities, but individuals as well.In a flat world, our multiple identities—consumer, employee, citizen, taxpayer, and shareholder—will come into increasingly acute conflict.

Business consultant Mitchell."The main conflict in the 19th century was labor conflict," Hammer said. "Now it's the conflict between the consumer and the worker, with the company in the middle. The consumer will say to the company, 'Let me get more for less.'" ’ Then companies say to their employees: ‘If we let them buy more for less, we’re going to be in trouble. We can’t guarantee you jobs, neither can union officers, only consumers can.’” The New York Times reported on November 1, 2004 that Wal-Mart's revenue in 2003 was US$256 billion, of which about US$1.3 billion was used to purchase health insurance for 45% of its employees (about 537,000 people).Wal-Mart's biggest competitor, Costco, buys medical insurance for 96% of its full-time or part-time employees. Among them, full-time employees can enjoy medical insurance after 3 months of work, and part-time employees can enjoy medical insurance after 6 months of work.But at Walmart, most full-time employees must work six months and part-time employees at least two years to qualify for health insurance.The article also said that the average full-time employee at Walmart makes about $1,200 a month, or $8 an hour, and he asked employees to pay 33 percent of their entitlements, which is currently down to 30 percent. Walmart's health insurance The plan requires each family to pay up to $264 a month in premiums, with out-of-pocket payments of up to $13,000 for some treatments, a cost that even employees with health insurance cannot afford.

The article also said: "Wal-Mart's Wall Street, where Cosco is accused of excessive labor costs." Wal-Mart has minimized costs, Cosco has not yet done so.Costco's pre-tax profit is only 2.7% of revenue, less than half of Wal-Mart's 5.5%. Wait a minute, if we were Wal-Mart customers, wouldn't we expect it to cut out all the middlemen, redundancies, and frictions and get us the lowest prices?Don't the poorest Americans -- who often don't have access to health care -- benefit the most from it?That's exactly Sebastian.As pointed out by Sebastian Mallaby in an opinion piece published in The Washington Post on November 28, 2005.“Wal-Mart’s critics claim the retailer is bad for America’s poor,” he writes. The claim is backward reasoning: as NYU’s Jensen.Fama said that Wal-Mart is "a success story that evolves with the times."

During the 2004 campaign, Fama advised John "Benedict Arnold" Kerry without ever accepting payment from Walmart; he was not an advocate for the company. But he points out that Walmart's food discounts alone save U.S. shoppers at least $50 billion a year.If Wal-Mart's discounts on all merchandise are included, the savings could be as much as five times that of $50 billion.The savings are particularly significant for poor and middle-income families.The average annual income of Wal-Mart shoppers is $35,000, compared with $50,000 for Target and $74,000 for Costco.In addition, Walmart's "everyday low prices" matter most to the poor, who spend a larger percentage of their income on food and other basics.

In terms of poverty alleviation power, Wal-Mart's $200 billion plus subsidies to consumers may be comparable to multiple federal programs. We shareholders and shoppers at Wal-Mart want it to remove redundancy and friction from the supply chain, cut employee benefits, maximize profits, and keep prices low.But if we were Wal-Mart workers, we must hate Wal-Mart's wages and benefits system.Everyone knows that because Wal-Mart, the largest company in the United States, cannot provide medical insurance to all employees, some people can only go to the emergency room of the local hospital for treatment, which is ultimately borne by taxpayers.

The New York Times reported that an investigation by Georgia officials found that "more than 10,000 children of Walmart employees are included in the state's financially burdensome children's health care program, which costs taxpayers nearly $10 million a year." Likewise, “North Carolina hospitals found that of the 1,900 patients they treated who identified themselves as Walmart employees, 31% were enrolled in Medicaid and 16% had no health insurance at all”. Reporter Lisa.Liza Featherstone's 2004 book Selling Women: The Struggle for Women's Power at Wal-Mart follows up Wal-Mart's case in court for discriminating against women. On November 22, 2004, Featherstone talked about his views on the book in an interview with Salon.com: "American taxpayers have to pay many full-time Wal-Mart employees for health insurance, housing provident funds and food stamps. — because Walmart employees are not self-sufficient in many ways. This is very ironic, since Sam Wharton has long been seen as a symbol of self-sufficiency in America. And Walmart's support for Republican candidates is also very dishonest The: 80% of their campaign funding goes to Republicans who tend not to support the public assistance programs that Walmart depends on. In fact, Walmart should demand national health insurance, and they should at least admit that they can't afford it for their employees These benefits require the state to establish a more comprehensive welfare system."

As you weigh your multiple identities—consumer, employee, citizen, taxpayer, shareholder—you must decide: Do you prefer the Wal-Mart or Costco approach?This would be a very big political question in a flat world: how flat do you want your company to be after you factor in multiple identities?Because when you take out the middleman, when you flatten the supply chain completely, you also take something of the humanity out of life. The same problem applies to governments.How flat do you want the government to be?To make it easier for companies to compete in a flat world, how much friction do you want governments to unwind the rules to reduce?House member Lamb.Emanuel, a Democrat from Illinois, was a senior deputy in the Clinton administration.He said: "During my time at the White House, we streamlined the FDA drug approval process with one goal - to get medicines to market faster. This created a public health crisis. The Vioxx incident It shows that drug safety issues have taken a back seat in the expedited approval process. The FDA is not doing enough to keep dangerous drugs off the market." As consumers, we want global supply chains that deliver the cheapest medicines, but as citizens, we want and need governments to monitor and regulate supply chains, even if it means creating or increasing friction. Let's clear our minds. Who Owns What In this flat world, there is one more thing that absolutely must be straightened out: Who owns what?How do we create legal safeguards to protect an innovator's intellectual property so he or she can use the proceeds of innovation to develop new products?On the other hand, how can we lower the walls as much as possible and encourage the sharing of intellectual property? Krieger, Microsoft's technical director."If there is a uniform treatment of intellectual property rights, the world will definitely not be flat," Mundy said. He said that if an innovator can pool many resources by himself, gather authors from the flat world and then obtain it in a certain product or service. A real breakthrough, that would be wonderful.But what should the innovator do if others use the platform and tools of the flat world to clone and distribute his new product?This is happening every day in software, music, and medicine today.And technology has reached the point where, "you know there's nothing in the world that can't be copied anytime soon"—from word processors made by Microsoft to airplane parts.The world is flat, the more we need a global governance system that can accommodate various legal or illegal cooperation methods. We can take the example of US patent law.Companies can do three things with an innovation: they can apply for a patent for their invention, and then be responsible for production and sales; they can apply for a patent and license others to produce it; they can apply for a patent and exchange the patented product of the other company with other companies , so that they can jointly produce a certain product, such as a computer is the product of a collection of different patents.U.S. patent law is still relatively technology-neutral.But experts told me that the existing case law clearly discriminates against the exchange of patents and discourages the promotion of patented products. It is more concerned with protecting the right of individual companies to produce their own patented products.In a flat world, what companies need is a patent system that encourages both.The more a country's legal system encourages the exchange of patents and standards, the more collaborative innovation results in that country.The personal computer is a product of the exchange of patents. Some companies have patents for cursor displays, and others have patents for mice and screens. So, as more and more innovations emerge from open-source collaborations and groups, intellectual property law must adapt—otherwise, as members of society, we won't be able to benefit from a flat world, or avoid it. shortcomings in the world. "In order for collaborative innovation to thrive, we must rethink our ideas about intellectual property." Sam, IBM's president.Palmisano (Sam Palmisano) said, "The original intention of establishing intellectual property law is to enable individuals and institutions to get paid for their inventions, and at the same time enable society as a whole to take advantage of this wealth of knowledge. And in this very delicate framework Opinions vary. Some believe that the best way to incentivize innovation is to strictly protect the private interests of inventors. Others believe that others should be given ample opportunity to take advantage of new innovations. Intellectual wealth created. I think we need to find new solutions that strike a balance between these two extremes. We must protect the interests of individuals and companies who actually make new and useful inventions.At the same time, we may want to protect the interests of innovative communities, creative ecosystems—groups that are not incorporated or chartered, but that engage in real—and really important—innovation.In the post-industrial age, we need to expand our ideas about ownership. " As you think about ownership, consider the following questions too. On November 13, 2004, Justin, a 20-year-old US Marine. M. Ellsworth was killed by a landmine while on patrol in Iraq.On Dec. 21 of that year, the Associated Press reported that his family had asked Yahoo for their son's e-mail password so they could see the letters he had sent and received.Justin's father, John.Ellsworth told The Associated Press: "I want to remember him through his words. He was doing what he felt was necessary and I want to keep his letters forever. These are my son's The last thing." We now live in a world where more and more communication is carried out in cyberspace as bits and stored on servers around the world.No single government can control this cyber kingdom.The question now is, when a person dies, who is in charge of his bits?The Associated Press reported that Yahoo later refused to provide Justin's family with his password on the grounds that Yahoo mailboxes would delete all records after 90 consecutive days of inactivity, and that all Yahoo users had recognized Yahoo's user notice from the very beginning— - A user's ID or record expires upon death.Yahoo spokeswoman Karen."While our hearts go out to the family of the deceased, the Yahoo account is not transferable," Mahone told The Associated Press.With digital formats increasingly replacing paper materials, it's a good idea to get everything sorted out before you die, and write down who you want to leave your bits to in your will. This is real.I have stored many chapters of this book in my AOL mailbox, which I feel is the safest place in cyberspace.If something unfortunate happened to me while I was writing, my family and the publisher could make a plea to AOL. Death of a Salesman While visiting my mother in Minneapolis in the fall of 2004, I came across three examples in a row that illustrate the flat world.First, before I left home in Washington, I called 411 (directory) to find a friend's phone number in Minneapolis.A computerized voice asked me to tell him the name of the person I was looking for. For some reason, the computer couldn't hear my voice clearly. It kept asking me in a computerized voice, "Did you mean..?" I had to tell it over and over again, but then my voice couldn't contain my anger (otherwise the computer still wouldn't understand), and finally, the computer passed the call to the operator.I didn't end up feeling the benefits of this computer service, although it removes all kinds of friction.I crave the friction, maybe it's cheaper and more efficient to provide phone numbers via a computer, but for me it's just frustration. When I arrived in Minneapolis, I had dinner with family and friends, one of whom had been working as a wholesaler in the Midwest, supplying retailers in the area.He's a born salesman.When I asked him how the market was doing recently, he sighed and said that the market was not as good as before.He explained that the profit margin of each commodity is only 1%. But in reality, this is nothing, because most of his wholesale commodities are bulk commodities, so it does not matter even if the profit margin is small when the sales volume is large.What really disturbed him was that he could no longer communicate face-to-face with his big clients.And even daily necessities and low-cost commodities have some differences that need to be explained and emphasized when they are sold. "Everything was done by email. I contacted one of the biggest retailers in the country and a young man answered the phone and he said, 'Email me your quote'. I never met him, there was Half the time he doesn't respond to my emails. I don't know how to deal with him..I used to go straight to their office and give these buyers some Virgin Air tickets. We are all good friends..everyone now It’s all about price.” Fortunately, my friend is a successful businessman who owns many businesses.But when I reflected on his words later, I recalled a scene from Death of a Salesman: Willie.Loman said he, unlike his colleague Charlie, wanted to be "likable".He told his son that, whether in business or in life, character, personality and relationships are more important than intelligence."The ones who show their face in business, the ones who get noticed are the ones who succeed," Willie said. "There's never a shortage of likable people." However, this is not necessarily the case in a flat world.It's hard to create relationships with email and the Internet. One day I was with my friend Ken.Greer, who runs a media company (more on that later), had dinner with him. Ken shares the same woe: a lot of contracts go to agencies that sell numbers, not inspiration.Then Ken said something that really hit me: "It's like they cut out the 'fat' from the business, they turned everything into a numbers game. But it's the fat that makes the meat taste good thing. Lean meat has no taste at all. You'll want him to have at least a little fat. "The flattening of the world keeps pushing 'fat' out of life and business, but like Ken said, fat is what makes life smell, and fat is what keeps us warm. Yes, as consumers, we sure hope Walmart squeezes the "fat" out of its prices.But as employees, we sure hope Walmart puts a little fat on the bones like Costco does, and that it offers health insurance to all of its employees.As shareholders, we naturally hope to get the profits of Wal-Mart, not Costco.As citizens, we hope that companies can provide benefits like Kosco, because the difference in company benefits will ultimately be borne by society.As consumers, we expect a small amount on our phone bill, but as a human being, I expect to speak to an operator when I call 411.Yes, as a reader, I love reading blog posts online, but as a citizen, I also wish those blogs had an editor or go-between telling these online grievances to double-check the facts before hitting "send" . Amid these conflicting feelings and pressures, American politics threatens to be completely restructured.Social conservatives on the right wing of the republican who don't like globalization or integration into it on the grounds that it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultures to the US may unite with unions representing the left wing of the democrats who don't like globalization This is because it would facilitate outsourcing or offshoring.These people can be called "the Wall Party" (the Wall Party), they will make friction and "fat" more.Let's face it: Republican conservatives have more in common with steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, farmers in China, and mullahs in central Saudi Arabia, all wanting more "walls" ’; and these conservatives may not have a common language at all with Wall Street investment bankers or those service industry workers in Palo Alto (where Silicon Valley is located) who are closely connected to the global economy. Meanwhile, the business wing of the Republican Party wants to promote free trade, deregulation, greater integration, and lower taxes, all of which would make the world flatter, and they may end up allied with the Social Liberals of the Democratic Party. Most of them are in the global service industry on the east and west coasts of the United States, and may also include employees in Hollywood and other entertainment industries.All of these people are beneficiaries of a flat world.They can be called "Internet Party" (the Web Party), the main purpose will be to promote more global integration.Residents of Manhattan and Palo Alto have more in common with people in Shanghai and Bangalore than Youngstown or Topeka (Kansas City) There are many more residents.Simply put, in a flat world we might see social democrats, white collar employees in global services, and Wall Street tycoons forming one interest group, and social conservatives, white collar employees in local services, and unions forming another interest group. The Passion of the Christ audience will be in the same trenches as the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, while the Hollywood and Wall Street liberals and the Electronic Love Letter (You 've Got Mail) audience will be in the same trenches as Silicon Valley's high-tech workers and global service providers in Manhattan and San Francisco.This will be Mel.Gibson, Jimmy. Hoffa (former leader of the Teamsters union) confronts Bill.Gates and Meg.Ryan. In a flat world, political life will demand more questions about which values, frictions, and "fat" are worth keeping, and which should be allowed to evaporate.Countries, companies, and individuals can give the right answers only if they understand the nature and structure of the global playing field and understand how it differs from the Cold War era.Only with a full appreciation of the level playing field and all the new tools for cooperating and competing can countries, companies, and individuals make the right political choices.It is my hope that this book will provide a general framework for this momentous political debate and the impending overhaul. To that end, the next three sections discuss how the flattening of the world and triple convergence will affect corporations, Americans, and the developing world. Cheer up!You are about to enter the flat world. The World Is Flat America and the Flat World America and the Flat World