As a kid, I loved hearing John Banner(Sergeant Schultz)'s rendition of the title of this post. I recently finished Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century", and I frequently found myself saying "Flat as a pancake" to myself as I made my way through.

If you haven't been paying attention to globalization (as if you couldn't) or are unaware of the forces working to make the big world into a very small place, then I'd suggest getting a copy of The World is Flat and educating yourself. I didn't find that many surprises in the book. After all, open source is one of Friedman's "Ten Flatteners", and I've been reasonably involved in that. Working in open source has given me an experience of globalization every day. I have friends and collaborators in many countries in the world, and have experienced first hand a number of the ideas that Friedman was writing about.

While I didn't necessarily find a lot of new ideas (although the presentation is good), I really valued all of the examples and interviews in the book. It's one thing to know conceptually that something is happening, and even to have some personal experience of it. But the examples that Friedman includes really showed how swiftly and deeply things have changed and how they are going to continue changing.