The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

In this final chapter, Friedman focuses on the two dates that he believes were the defining events of the previous 15 years: 11/9/89 and 9/11/01. The former opened the world with the fall of the Berlin Wall, making America the world’s sole superpower. The latter, the day that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked by terrorists, threatened to close the world again. Friedman writes that the two dates represent “two competing forms of imagination”—creative and destructive (607).

Friedman tells the stories of two men who each created an airline from scratch in 1999. One was David Neeleman, who founded JetBlue, and the other was Osama bin Laden, who drew up plans to attack New York and Washington, D.C. Both men utilized the tools available in a flat world, and Friedman is struck by how much bin Laden and his co-conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resembled a venture capitalist and an engineer-entrepreneur, respectively. Bin Laden was also a deft supply chain manager, outsourcing activities as needed, finding resources, and making payments. Neeleman and bin Laden are examples of creative and destructive imaginations.

To explain how we can encourage everyone to use the flat world’s tools for good, Friedman tells a story from eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman.