If you are even remotely familiar with Thomas L. Friedman’s book, “The World Is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” you know about one of the biggest flatteners in the world: Wal-Mart.
To industry giants back in the day, Wal-Mart seemed like a small, podunk retailer. Then it embraced cost-cutting technology with the passion of a rabid accountant so it could offer its customers the absolute lowest prices and gain a massive competitive advantage.
Granted and even admitted, Wal-Mart committed some serious judgment errors in management style and a few practices, and has been called on the carpet for those miscues. Generally, it has also addressed those miscues (as good businesses do) and moved forward. But those mistakes don’t change the revolutionary chain of sticky innovations that recreated how stores operate top to bottom. Wal-Mart blazed new trails in retail and most follow it now. Wal-Mart’s Glue is so sticky that the name has become a verb: “Let’s go Wal-Marting.” “That store got Wal-Marted.”
Wal-Mart pioneered supply-chaining in a way that laid low the old ways of retailing and made Mr. Sam and those near him richer than anyone outside of Bill Gates’ immediate family. This horizontal approach flattened the world of retail and flattened Wal-Mart’s competitors at the same time.
Wal-Mart succeeds in all those towns because of its commitment to processes that bring customers lower prices. That takes Glue at every link in the supply chain. Wal-Mart has shelves filled with Glue. Like it or hate it, Wal-Mart has Glued its brand to the ones who matter most: Customers. That one focused, bonding, business practice has allowed it to overcome dozens of mistakes.
Mr. Friedman’s flat worldview tells the historic and economic tale of how service and manufacturing and supply chain expansion into low-cost places like India and China have made the world smaller and made us all run faster just to stay in place. There are evidences of much Glue in his tale as well, and although he doesn’t specifically mention them as Glue (Glue is our definition), the evidence is everywhere.
India is using Glue when it turns its trained and skilled high-tech workers loose on industries that used to be American-based. Your income taxes are likely being done for your accountant in India via blind digital Internet sources. Lead-based toys and tainted food aside, China has Glued its economy into the flattening world manufacturing and supply chain scenario using the advantage it has: Motivated human capital. When China gets the kinks worked out, the Glue will flow.
More is at work here than just low prices and cost-cutting. To make both of those things a permanent fixture in their outsourcing revolution, India and China have found a million points of Glue to align this successful undertaking on a worldwide scale.
It is no accident that America and India and China and Korea (Hyundai) are getting along so well. It’s just Glue at work.
