From my window, the world looks anything but flat. Yet, that’s what Thomas Friedman maintains in his national bestseller, “The World Is Flat, A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.”

Friedman’s latest book points to the convergence of technology and events that have allowed India, China and many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, “creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world’s two biggest nations and giving them a huge new stake of globalization.”

And, thus, “flattening” the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place. The question the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner asks: “Has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?”

“Outsourcing,” “offshoring,” “homesourcing,” “open-sourcing.” These are words Friedman uses to explain how quickly this globalization has occurred, and he is not alone in his theories.

One of India’s smartest engineers, trained at his country’s top technical institute, put it this way: “Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world. What happened over the last [few] years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.” At the same time, computers became cheaper, there was an explosion of software, and around the year 2000 all these things came together, creating a platform “where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again.”

In short, the playing field was being leveled.

Friedman notes an African proverb posted in an American auto parts factory in Beijing: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.”

Who is the lion and who is the gazelle? Friedman asks. “Ever since the Chinese joined the WTO, [World Trade Organization on Dec. 11, 2001] both they and the rest of the world have had to run faster and faster.”

“Being an American,” he writes, “I am most focused on my own country. How do we go about maximizing the benefit and opportunities of the flat world, and providing protection for those who have difficulty with the transition, without resorting to protectionism or runaway capitalism?”

Friedman answers that complex question through several categories, beginning with leadership. “The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or national level, should be in good part, to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to thrive within it. It is hard to have an American national strategy for dealing with flatism if people don’t even acknowledge that there is an education gap emerging and that there is an ambition gap emerging and that we are in a quiet crisis.”

He also stresses the need for improved parenting in this country. “There comes a time when you’ve got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television set, put away the iPod, and get your kids down to work.” In summary, Americans need to work harder, run faster and become smarter.

“On such a flat earth, the most important attribute you can have is creative imagination – the ability to be the first on your block to figure out how all these enabling tools can be put together in new and exciting ways to create products, communities, opportunities and profits.

“That has always been America’s strength, because America was, and for now still is, the world’s greatest dream machine.”