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

Nilekani is a co-founder and former CEO of Infosys, an Indian firm that provides various business services such as outsourcing and consulting. He gave Friedman the idea that “the world is flat” when he told Friedman, “Tom, the playing field is being leveled” (7). Friedman visits one of Infosys’s call centers to see this leveling in action. Nilekani also gave Friedman the idea for one of the flatteners discussed in Chapter 2, insourcing, by alerting him to the fact that UPS had started doing much more than delivering packages.

Rao is a co-founder and former CEO of the software firm MphasiS, which was instrumental in the outsourcing of certain accounting services from the United States. In the section on workflow programs in Chapter 2, Friedman quotes Rao: “[they] are enabling us to do for the service industry what Henry Ford did for manufacturing” (91). Rao also tells Friedman that China and India know what they must do to secure their countries’ futures: Do what Americans are doing at right now. The role of Americans, on the other hand, is to invent the future.

Neeleman is the founder of JetBlue and several other airlines. He is a prominent figure in Chapter 1. Neeleman helps Friedman understand homesourcing, a counterpart of outsourcing in which jobs stay at home (in their country of origin) and in the home (employees work from home). A large share of JetBlue’s reservation system was set up with this working arrangement. At the end of the book, Friedman compares and contrasts Neeleman with Osama bin Laden; both Neeleman and bin Laden used the tools of globalization (e.g., a global supply chain) to found airlines in 1999, but only one of them did this for positive endeavors.