The World Is Flat Analysis

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“THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL”- Seriously? Globalization has become the buzzword of the last two decades. As Tom Fredrick has said in his book The World Is Flat, Friedman recounts on a journey that how globalization is changing the economies of countries as a whole. Friedman recounts many examples of companies to tell us that the world has indeed crpossed national boundaries and is a single marketplace. He cites examples based in India and China that, by providing labor ranging from that of typists and call center operators to accountants and computer programmers, have become integral parts of complex global supply chains; such companies are Dell, AOL, and Microsoft. The ten most radical changes that Friedman feels led the world towards making…show more content…
It is not only interesting but also important to have a broad view on this subject as it directly impacts the economies of countries and thereby largely affects the strategies of businesses. The Counterview by Dr. Prakash Ghemavat in his article, “The World Isn’t Flat” gives us insights which state that globalization is just over-rated. Economies, Countries are for sure flatter than ever but the numbers and figures claim that its just a very little fraction that globalization has impacted. The rest is just the hype because of which companies are going extremely wrong in forming their business strategies.The answer is related in part to how companies frame their globalization strategies. In many if not most cases, companies see globalization as a matter of taking a superior (by assumption) business model and extending it geographically, with necessary modifications, to maximize the firm's economies of scale. From this perspective, the key strategic challenge is simply to determine how much to adapt the business model—how much to standardize from country to country versus how much to localize to respond to local differences. Recently, as at Coke, many companies have moved toward more localization and less standardization. But no matter how they balance localization and standardization, all companies that view global strategy in this way focus on similarities across countries, and the potential for the scale economies that such commonalities unlock, as their primary source of added value. Differences from country to country, in contrast, are viewed as obstacles that need to be

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