American- and European-based multinationals-everything from computer maintenance to
specific research projects to answering customer calls routed there from all over
the world. Security is tight, cameras monitor the doors, and if you are working for
American Express, you cannot get into the building that is managing services and
research for General Electric. Young Indian engineers, men and women, walk briskly
from building to building, dangling ID badges. One looked like he could do my taxes.
Another looked like she could take my computer apart. And a third looked like she
designed it!
After sitting for an interview, Nilekani gave our TV crew a tour of Info-sys's global
conferencing center-ground zero of the Indian outsourcing industry. It was a
cavernous wood-paneled room that looked like a tiered classroom from an Ivy League
law school. On one end was a massive wall-size screen and overhead there were cameras
in the ceiling for teleconferencing. "So this is our conference room, probably the
largest screen in Asia-this is forty digital screens [put together]," Nilekani
explained proudly, pointing to the biggest flat-screen TV I had ever seen. Infosys,
he said, can hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its entire global supply
chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So their American designers
could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian
manufacturers all at once. "We could be sitting here, somebody from New York, London,
Boston, San Francisco, all live. And maybe the implementation is in Singapore, so
the Singapore person could also be live here . . . That's globalization," said Nilekani.
Above the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed upthe Infosys workday:
24/7/365. The clocks were labeled US West, US East, GMT, India, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Japan, Australia.
"Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today
in the world," Nilekani explained. "What happened over the last [few] years is that
there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when
hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity
around the world, undersea cables, all those things." At the same time, he added,
computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion
of software-e-mail, search engines like Google, and

proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston,
one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote
development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, added
Nilekani, they "created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital,
could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed,
produced, and put back together again-and this gave a whole new degree of freedom
to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature . . . And what you
are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming
together."
We were sitting on the couch outside of Nilekani's office, waiting for the TV crew
to set up its cameras. At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani
uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, "Tom, the playing field is being


leveled." He meant that countries like India are now able to compete for global
knowledge work as never before-and that America had better get ready for this. America
was going to be challenged, but, he insisted, the challenge would be good for America
because we are always at our best when we are being challenged. As I left the Infosys
campus that evening and bounced along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on
that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened .. .
Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!
Here I was in Bangalore-more than five hundred years after Columbus sailed over the
horizon, using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned
safely to prove definitively that the world was round-and one of India's smartest
engineers, trained at his country's top technical institute and backed by the most
modern technologies of his day, was essentially telling me that the world was flat-as
flat as that screen on which he can host a meeting of his whole global supply chain.
Even more interesting, he was citing this development as a good thing, as a new
milestone in human progress and a great opportunity for India and the world-the fact
that we had made our world flat!
In the back of that van, I scribbled down four words in my notebook: "The world is
flat." As soon as I wrote them, I realized that this was the

underlying message of everything that I had seen and heard in Bangalore in two weeks
of filming. The global competitive playing field was being leveled. The world was
being flattened.
As I came to this realization, I was filled with both excitement and dread. The
journalist in me was excited at having found a framework to better understand the
morning headlines and to explain what was happening in the world today. Clearly, it
is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time
with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners
of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history
of the world-using computers, e-mail, networks, teleconferencing, and dynamic new
software. That is what Nandan was telling me. That was what I discovered on my journey
to India and beyond. And that is what this book is about. When you start to think
of the world as flat, a lot of things make sense in ways they did not before. But
I was also excited personally, because what the flattening of the world means is that
we are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single
global network, which-if politics and terrorism do not get in the way-could usher
in an amazing era of prosperity and innovation.
But contemplating the flat world also left me filled with dread, professional and
personal. My personal dread derived from the obvious fact that it's not only the
software writers and computer geeks who get empowered to collaborate on work in a
flat world. It's also al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks. The playing field is
not being leveled only in ways that draw in and superempower a whole new group of
innovators. It's being leveled in a way that draws in and superempowers a whole new
group of angry, frustrated, and humiliated men and women.