Surviving in a Flat World
The other day I had a problem with my laptop. It was after office hours. I dialed the company’s IT helpdesk number and a man with a foreign accent answered the call at the other end. He asked me a few basic computer questions, requested me to do a few simple steps and within seconds he took control of my computer screen. He copied files onto my laptop, deleted old ones and replaced them with new ones. About 15 minutes later, the problem was fixed and I was back at work again. Well, nothing so unusual about that except that I was sitting comfortably in my office in Kuala Lumpur and he was controlling my cursor from Bangalore, India!
It turns out that, as a global company constantly looking for the cheapest way of doing things, the company I work for has outsourced some of the operations which used to be done here in Kuala Lumpur to India. For IT support, during normal office hours calls are directed to Cyberjaya but after hours calls are transferred to other call centres around the globe. When I want to invoice customers for completed work I just need to send an e-mail to instruct the accounts team in Chennai, India to prepare an invoice. They will process the invoice, print out a hardcopy in Chennai, courier it out via DHL to the customer, even though the customer office happens to be only 3 floors below my office here in Kuala Lumpur. Now you may think it does not make sense to have the invoice issued out from another continent when the recipient sits in the same building as you. And perhaps you are wondering why I’m telling you this story and what lessons can we learn from all this? The answer is in the word “globalisation”.
In an interconnected world where business is conducted at the speed of light there is no guarantee that we will keep our job. Millions of qualified people in India, China and other emerging economies are eager and willing to take our job if we do not equip ourselves with specialized skills that differentiate us from them. Already they can do the same job much cheaper. Any job that can be digitized and discretised into packets of data can be sent over a broadband cable to find the cheapest place where it can be done. Transfer of data is virtually free. As an economy which has been growing steadily since the early 80s, we are no longer a country with cheap labour. We must realize this and we have to prepare our people to move up quickly on the technological ladder. Otherwise, we’ll lose out to them just like we lost to China, Vietnam or Laos in manufacturing.
Thomas Friedman in his book “The World is Flat” wrote about the emergence of countries like India and China and the forces that enabled them to compete with industrialised countries like the US and Europe. These forces, which he calls flatteners, feed the next stage of globalisation or Globalisation 3.0. He observes that while Globalisation 1.0 turns big into medium, and Globalisation 2.0 turns the medium into small, the third stage of globalization is turning the small into tiny. And unlike the first and second stages where the forces rested with countries and companies, it is now driven by individuals. What this means is that, with the IT and Internet revolution, millions of people are now able to work and collaborate with other people sitting half a world away and produce results which are far better than the sum of each of them working alone. Work is no longer confined by distance or geographical boundaries. A Malaysian company cheque for a customer here in Malaysia, may be prepared in the Philippines. An American secondary school kid’s homework may be checked by his tutor in India; or perhaps in future your house sales and purchase agreement will be prepared by a lawyer in Eastern Europe whom you never meet. The bottom line is if you have the necessary skills and can offer the cheapest service, you can be in any corner of the world, yet will still be able to perform jobs for customers from half a world away.
Friedman’s book is aimed at his fellow Americans whom he thinks have been sleeping while the rest of the world is stealing their jobs. He was referring to the waves of outsourcing and offshoring jobs that went to India and China because of much cheaper labour costs in the two countries. What he says in his book sometimes can be a bit of an exaggeration but he has made a loud wake-up call for Americans to realise that the rest of the world is catching up while they are losing their competitiveness. There are lessons for us too. Malaysians, especially the Bumiputras and Umnoputras, should wake up as well and realise that the big wave called globalisation is affecting us all. We cannot live in a protected environment forever. The rest of the world is preparing themselves with boats and ships to ride out the storm. We have not even started learning how to swim because we are scared of water. In a flat world, the faster we hit the water, the better are our chances of survival.
