Props to Thomas Friedman. In 2004, he barely knew outsourcing existed. Then, he goes to India. Instead of locating his chakras and opening a yoga studio in Pittsburgh, he ends up in Bangalore and gets shell-shocked by all the big buildings. WOW! Cisco is HERE?! You guys have computers in India? DSL? Amazing!!

Just like that, every executive in America has an unread copy of The World Is Flat on their bookshelf, and we’re all using a metaphor that never made that much sense.

So, let’s settle things. The world is not flat. It is curvy. Lumpy. Tilted. Full of nooks and crannies. And as a whole, still ROUND.

What’s wrong with the ‘flat world’ metaphor?
Besides my apparent jealousy of Thomas Friedman’s success, what’s so wrong with his metaphor?

To start with, the image of a flat world is all about capability.

Just a few years ago, Friedman made a case that information work can now happen anywhere, thanks to communications technology, skilled labor, and cost incentives.

Got it, Tom. People in India and China CAN do anything that we can do in the US. They have education. Computers. Telephone headsets.

This may have been a surprise to the majority of Americans in 1996. But, in 2007, it sounds kinda like Al Gore inventing the Internet.

Besides, if someone with a name like Tejas Patel or Timothy Wu was in your 3rd grade math class, you are already aware of what India and China CAN do. If Abhishek Chakrabarty fixed your computer last week, you have no doubt about India’s potential.

But does that mean the world is flat?
If the world is flat, my customer support experience should be the same whether the call center operator lives in San Jose, CA or San Jose, Costa Rica. If it’s flat, Chinese products would have the same quality standards that American ones do. In a flat world, 50% of offshore IT projects wouldn’t fail due to communication and quality issues.

The world is full of strange curves and contours. All this ‘flat world’ talk tends to gloss over the cultural differences, language barriers (even if you speak English, it doesn’t mean you understand it the same way only, isn’t it?), management challenges, time differences etc. that global collaboration brings up.

When we accept that the world is still round, we can have a better conversation about these challenges, deal with the management issues, and work harder on bridging cultural understanding.

It sounds simple-minded, obvious, cliched, etc., I know. But metaphors are powerful things. Once they become part of the vernacular, they have this funny ability to affect our thought process.

Besides, flat is boring.

Curves are a good thing
We recently opened an animation studio in Mumbai. The reason is simple; it’s India’s entertainment capital. The best animators in India arrive from all over the country looking for opportunities.

In the city of Pune, we helped to build one of the best Ruby on Rails teams in the country, because we found a pool of programmers eager to learn new technologies.

And, we continue to handle most of our business from Chandigarh, because we nurtured a skilled set of designers and developers in a city where turnover is low.

So never mind the world, India isn’t even flat.

Nor should it be. Regional specialties are awesome. They can make things more efficient, if you do it right. They can add some spice to your life. And, they can prevent the use of overused, localized cliches that others may not understand.

In short, moving away from the flat world metaphor may spark more conversation about regional specialties, help us to embrace the inherent challenges of outsourcing with more of an open mind, and most importantly, force conference organizers to work harder on their panel titles.

Thomas Friedman has already sold a few million books. Let’s ditch the ‘Flat World’ metaphor. And start celebrating the humps and the lumps.