CEO Blog - Time Leadership

The World is Flat

I am just out of 3 fairly intense days of meetings. Too much sitting. Lots of value though. So many things to do that I could send emails until midnight.

My current favourite book is “'>The World is Flat”, a brief history of the twenty-first century by Thomas Friedman. Awesome read. It talks about how almost any function can be done almost anywhere in the world and how we can still prosper in this time of outsourcing.

This flattening is cause by 10 factors:

1 – the fall of the Berlin wall and what it represents.
2 – the internet
3 – Work flow software
4 – open source
5 – outsourcing
6 – offshoring
7 – supply chaining (of course this is good news for SYNNEX since we are a supply chain company)
8 – insourcing
9 – in-forming
10 – and what he calls the steroids – Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual

And of course I don’t do it justice – you need to read the book to get it.

It inspires me to make sure my people have the skills to interface with the customers and suppliers because much of the back room analysis can be moved offshore. In moving offshore we need to improve our communication skills (never a bad thing to polish anyways). We also need to polish our systems for interacting at a distance. Companies that do this are the ones to thrive.

It also gave me hope that the flattening of the world will actually mean more jobs in North America and more prosperity globally.

SYNNEX is fortunate to already be a global company with fairly large operations in both China and India. It gives me comfort to know we are already there. Now just polish.

posted by Jim Estill @ 4:09 PM