When January 2004 rolled around and Airborne began switching off its system, Aramex was up and running for a seamless handoff. And because Aramex was able to run its new system off an Internet platform, with software designed primarily by lower-cost Jordanian programmers, installation of the new system took place virtually, without Aramex having to send its engineers to train any of the alliance partners. Each partner company could build its own client base over the Internet through the Aramex system, do its own tracking and tracing, and be part of the new virtual global air freight network.
“So now we are managing this global network, with forty alliance partners, and we cover every geographic area in the world,” said Ghandour. “We saved so much money... With our Web-based system all you needed was a browser and a password to get into the Aramex network, and suddenly you're inside a global shipment management system.” Aramex trained many of the employees of the other alliance companies how to use its system by using various online channels, including voice over the Internet, online chatting, and other virtual training tools available on Aramex's intranet-making the training incredibly cheap.
Like UPS, Aramex has quickly moved into insourcing. Arab and foreign banks in the Middle East have outsourced the delivery of their credit cards to Aramex; mobile phone companies are using Aramex delivery men to collect bills on their behalf, with the delivery men just scanning the customer's credit card and then issuing a receipt. (Aramex may be high-tech, but it has not shrunk from using donkeys to cross military roadblocks to deliver packages in the West Bank when Israeli-Palestinian clashes have closed roads.)
“We are a very flat organization,” Ghandour explained. “This is not traditional, because Arab institutions in the private sector tend to look like the governments-very hierarchal and patriarchal. That is not how Aramex works. There are no more than two to three layers between me and anyone in the company. Every single knowledge worker in this organization has a computer with e-mail and Internet access. Right here from your computer I can access my intranet and see exactly what is happening in the organization without my senior people having to report to me.”
In sum, Fadi Ghandour took advantage of several new forms of collaboration-supply-chaining, outsourcing, insourcing, and all the steroids—to make his little $200-million-a-year company very big. Or, as he put it with a smile, “I was big locally and small internationally-and I reversed that.”
Rule #3: And the big shall act small... One way that big companies learn to flourish in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their customers to act really big.
Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman of Starbucks, says that Starbucks estimates that it is possible to make nineteen thousand variations of coffee on the basis of the menus posted at any Starbucks outlet. What Starbucks did, in other words, was make its customers its drink designers and allow them to customize their drinks to their exact specifications. Starbucks never thought of offering soy milk, Schultz told me, until store managers started to get bombarded with demands for it from customers, to the point where they were going to the grocery store across the street in the middle of the day to buy cartons of soy milk. Starbucks learned from its customers, and today some 8 percent of all the drinks that Starbucks sells include soy milk. “We didn't dream up the different concoctions with soy milk,” said Schultz, “the customers did.” Starbucks just collaborated with them. The smartest big companies clearly understand that the triple convergence allows them to collaborate with their customers in a totally new fashion-and, by doing so, to act really small. The way that big companies act small is not by targeting each individual consumer and trying to serve that customer individually. That would be impossible and impossibly expensive. They do it by making their business, as much as possible, into a buffet. These companies create a platform that allows individual customers to serve themselves in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time, according to their own tastes. They are actually making their customers their employees and having them pay the company for that pleasure at the same time!