The World is Flat: The #1 Free Podcast on iTunesU

I would much rather the dis­course on Glob­al­iza­tion came from econ­o­mists like Joe­sph Stiglitz (Nobel win­ner for eco­nom­ics and was Chief Econ­o­mist at World Bank), Paul Krug­man (Prince­ton), Pankaj Ghe­mawat (Harvard)etc. Ted Kop­pel inter­views Fried­man and Joseph Stiglitz, who ofcourse does­nt find a men­tion in Fried­man’s book.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/opinion/25friedman-transcript.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Two books to read, which offer a coun­ter­per­spec­tive to Fried­man’s “The World is Flat.”

The Har­vard Pro­fes­sor, Pankaj Ghe­mawat’s lat­est book, “Redefin­ing Glob­al Strat­e­gy,” is more aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly inclined. I read an arti­cle of his pub­lished in the jour­nal, “For­eign Pol­i­cy”, where he argues that the world is, at best, only semi-glob­al­ized. His argu­ment being that Cul­tur­al, Admin­is­tra­tive, Geo­graph­ic and Eco­nom­ic aspects of a nation come in the way of total glob­al­iza­tion from tak­ing place and cites exam­ples of the same.

The oth­er small, but inter­est­ing book, is by Aron­i­ca and Ram­doo, “The World is Flat? A Crit­i­cal Analy­sis of Thomas Fried­man’s New York Times Best­seller.” It is a small book com­pared to the 600 page tome by Fried­man, and aimed at the com­mon man and stu­dents alike. As pop­u­lar as the book may be, some review­ers assert that by what it leaves out, Fried­man’s book is dan­ger­ous. The authors point to the fact that there isn’t a sin­gle table or data foot­note in Fried­man’s entire book. “Glob­al­iza­tion is the great­est reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the world since the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion,” says Aron­i­ca. Aron­i­ca and Ram­doo con­clude by list­ing over twen­ty action items that point the way for­ward, and they pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive, yet con­cise, frame­work for under­stand­ing the crit­i­cal issues of glob­al­iza­tion.

You may want to see http://www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch http://www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an inter­est­ing coun­ter­per­spec­tive on Fried­man’s
“The World is Flat”.

Also a real­ly inter­est­ing 6 min wake-up call: Shift Hap­pens! http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html

There is also a com­pan­ion book list­ed: Extreme Com­pe­ti­tion: Inno­va­tion and the Great 21st Cen­tu­ry Busi­ness Ref­or­ma­tion
http://www.mkpress.com/extreme
http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html