Dara Ali
Professor Roger G.
April 17, 2011
The World Is Flat
While I was Sleeping

Thomas Friedman, the American genius writer, in the first chapter, While I was Sleeping, in his book, the World is Flat, points out some facts and identifies some terms regarding globalization and outsourcing. Before we get to the depth of the topic of this chapter, it is better if we identify the term-outsourcing. According to the internet, “Outsourcing: [is] acquiring services or products from an outside supplier or manufacturer in order to cut costs.”
Dividing human history into three different eras, the author tells how each stage of humanity has an effect on life and how it arranged to be changed as time passed. More, the third era according to Friedman, which begins from 2000 to the present, when the world started flattening as peoples started managing globalization to a great extend, has greatly accelerated business and greatly impacted industry.
To a better knowing and explaining his terms, Thomas Friedman goes around the world in a journey. Visiting some different places around the world such as Japan, China and back to America, we can see explicit examples of the business outsourcing phenomenon worldwide. Seeing American trademarks like HP and Pizza Hut in India, simply shows how the world tend to be flat, literally. Friedman takes us to different eras of humanity-from the time when Columbus found America to the present-to show globalization through a historical narrative way.
Thus, both globalization and business outsourcing are the key terms that Friedman explains in the first chapter of his book, The World Is Flat.