NO SIZE FITS ALL by Michael S. Malone

Get ready for a bi-polar world.

Despite the title of a best-selling book of a few years back, it turns out that the world isn’t flat. And, despite all of the leveling forces being unleashed by the Internet, global business and social networks, it won’t be getting any flatter in our lifetimes.

However, don’t believe the growing legions of nay-sayers to Tom Friedman’s book either, because nearly all of them begin by accepting his underlying premise . . .and then set out to debunk it by showing how pockets of entrenched cultural differences won’t succumb to Twitter and the iPhone.

As many recent stories have shown, if your business follows Friedman’s advice you are very likely to get blind-sided by markets with rules that are alien – even antithetical – to our own. But if you follow the advice of the Friedman debunkers, you risk even greater disaster by not taking advantage of the scalability of the new digital marketing, distribution and sales tools – that is, while the “Flat Worlders” are likely to get bruised by real cultural diversity, non-believers, “Bumpy Worlders” risk being killed by more efficient competitors.

So, what’s the truth?

I’m not trying to be clever when I tell you that it is both. And yesterday, a new book of mine, No Size Fits All, was published to explain that answer. If you are keeping track, yes, that’s two books by me in a single year – and I’ve got a nice case of tendonitis to show for it.

The first book, if you’ll remember (The Future Arrived Yesterday) described the rise of a new kind of company, the ‘protean’ corporation, that is beginning to appear around the world. The new book looks at the emerging global market in which these companies will joust for dominance. I’ve co-authored No Size Fits All with marketing guru and Silicon Valley executive Tom Hayes, whose own book, The Jump Point – on the impending explosion of two billion more consumers around the world – was published last year and neatly dovetails with the two other books. Still to be written (next year, because I’m getting too old for this pace) is a fourth book, also co-authored by Tom and me, which will describe how these protean corporations will actually compete and eventually control the new global marketplace. That, with luck, will complete what we think is the first real vision of global business competition in the 21^st century.

Now, let’s go back to that apparent contradiction between a world that is both ‘flat’ and ‘bumpy.’ To understand how that can be so, you need only look at your own life today as a consumer in the 21^st century economy. I suspect that if you do so, you’ll see that you are, in fact, moving simultaneously in opposing directions.

On the one hand, all of us are becoming major players (because of our comparative wealth) in an emerging, Web-driven global economy. We shop on Amazon, buy from eBay, send Tweets and IMs, write Gmails, search Google, download iPhone apps and iTunes, watch Hulu, etc. We no longer really know or care where these enterprises are located, and we are comfortable in the knowledge that wherever we are on the planet, we can simply use or cellphones or laptops to access them. If that item we just won on eBay, or that website we regularly visit, happens to be located in Nairobi instead of Nashville, we are largely indifferent. By the same token, when we sit in that conference room at work and use the Cisco system to teleconference a meeting, the novelty of the other participants being in Tel Aviv, Sydney and Brussels wears off quickly.