The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

In Chapter 11, the sole chapter in the section entitled “Companies and the Flat World,” Friedman presents nine rules that successful companies follow in a flat world.

The first is: Dream big. “When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you” (442). Friedman describes a Peruvian man who sells traditional handcrafted goods online to American customers; the man investigates whether he could have the goods made in and shipped from China. The second rule follows from the first: “Because we are in a world where whatever can be done will be done, the most important competition today is between you and your own imagination” (447). Americans, he writes, should not be trying to compete with others in markets that are already established. Instead, they should be competing with themselves to dream up the next new thing.

Another rule holds that small companies will thrive by acting large, and that they accomplish this by utilizing the collaborative tools available in a flat world. For example, the Jordanian shipping company Aramex started out by partnering with Airborne, a much larger American company, to handle Airborne’s shipments to the Middle East.