For all these reasons, most people missed the triple convergence. Something really big was happening, and it was simply not part of public discourse in America or Europe. Until I visited India in early 2004,1 too was largely ignorant of it, although I was picking up a few hints that something was brewing. One of the most thoughtful business leaders I have come to know over the years is Nobuyuki Idei, the chairman of Sony. Whenever he speaks, I pay close attention. We saw each other twice during 2004, and both times he said something through his heavy Japanese accent that stuck in my ear. Idei said that a change was under way in the business-technology world that would be remembered, in time, like “the meteor that hit the earth and killed all the dinosaurs.” Fortunately, the cutting-edge global companies knew what was going on out there, and the best companies were quietly adapting to it so that they would not be one of those dinosaurs.
As I started researching this book, I felt at times like I was in a Twilight Zone segment. I would interview CEOs and technologists from major companies, both American-based and foreign, and they would describe in their own ways what I came to call the triple convergence. But, for all the reasons I explained above, most of them weren't telling the public or the politicians. They were either too distracted, too focused on their own businesses, or too afraid. It was like they were all “pod people,” living in a parallel universe, who were in on a big secret. Yes, they all knew the secret-but nobody wanted to tell the kids.
Well, here's the truth that no one wanted to tell you: The world has been flattened. As a result of the triple convergence, global collaboration and competition-between individuals and individuals, companies and individuals, companies and companies, and companies and customers– have been made cheaper, easier, more friction-free, and more productive for more people from more corners of the earth than at any time in the history of the world.
You know “the IT revolution” that the business press has been touting for the last twenty years? Sorry, but that was only the prologue. The last twenty years were just about forging, sharpening, and distributing all the new tools with which to collaborate and connect. Now the real IT revolution is about to begin, as all the complementarities between these tools start to really work together to level the playing field. One of those who pulled back the curtain and called this moment by its real name was HP's Carly Fiorina, who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just “the end of the beginning.” The last twenty-five years in technology, said Fiorina, then the CEO of HP, have been just “the warm-up act.” Now we are going into the main event, she said, “and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will literally transform every aspect of business, every aspect of life and every aspect of society.”
FOUR: The Great Sorting Out
The triple convergence is not only going to affect how individuals prepare themselves for work, how companies compete, and how countries organize their economies and geopolitics. Over time, it is going to reshape political identities, recast political parties, and redefine who is a political actor. In short, in the wake of this triple convergence that we have just gone through, we are going to witness what I call “the great sorting out.” Because when the world starts to move from a primarily vertical (command and control) value-creation model to an increasingly horizontal (connect and collaborate) creation model, it doesn't affect just how business gets done. It affects everything-how communities and companies define themselves, where companies and communities stop and start, how individuals balance their different identities as consumers, employees, shareholders, and citizens, and what role government has to play. All of this is going to have to be sorted out anew. The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identity disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era. Because as we go through this great sorting out over the next decade, we are going to see some very strange bedfellows making some very new politics.