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was only one global parcel delivery service operating in the Arab world: DHL, today

owned by the German postal service. Ghandour's idea was to approach American companies,

like Federal Express and Airborne Express, that did not have a Middle East presence

and offer to become their local delivery service, playing on the fact that an Arab

company would know the region and how to get around unpleasantries like the Israeli

invasion of Lebanon, the Iran-Iraq war, and the American invasion of Iraq.

"We said to them, 'Look, we don't compete with you locally in your home market, but

we understand the Middle East market, so why not give your packages to us to deliver

out here?" said Ghandour. "We will be your Middle East delivery arm. Why give them

to your global competitor, like DHL?" Airborne responded positively, and Ghandour

used

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that to build his own business and then buy up or partner with small delivery firms

from Egypt to Turkey to Saudi Arabia and later all the way over to India, Pakistan,

and Iran-creating his own regional network. Airborne did not have the money that

Federal Express was investing in setting up its own operations in every region of

the globe, so it created an alliance, bringing together some forty regional delivery

companies, like Aramex, into a virtual global network. What Airborne's partners got

was something none of them could individually afford to build at the time- a global

geographic presence and a computerized package tracking and tracing system to compete

with that of a FedEx or DHL.

Airborne "made their online computerized tracking and tracing system available to

all its partners, so there was a unified language and set of quality standards for

how everyone in the Airborne alliance would deliver and track and trace packages,"

explained Ghandour. With his company headquartered in Amman, Jordan, Ghandour tapped

into the Airborne system by leasing a data line that was connected from Amman all

the way to Airborne's big mainframe computer in its headquarters in Seattle. Through

dumb terminals back in the Middle East, Aramex tracked and traced its packages using

Airborne's back room. Aramex, in fact, was the earliest adopter of the Airborne system.

Once Ghandour's Jordanian employees got up to speed on it, Airborne hired them to

go around the world to install systems and train the other alliance partners. So these

Jordanians, all of whom spoke English, went off to places like Sweden and the Far

East and taught the Airborne methods of tracking and tracing. Eventually, Airborne

bought 9 percent of Aramex to cement the relationship.

The arrangement worked well for everyone, and Aramex came to dominate the parcel

delivery market in the Arab world, so well that in 1997, Ghandour decided to take

the company public on Broadway, also known as the Nasdaq. Aramex continued to grow

into a nearly $200-million-a-year company, with thirty-two hundred employees-and

without any big government contracts. Its business was built for and with the private

sector, highly unusual in the Arab world. Because of the dotcom boom, which deflected

interest from brick-and-mortar companies like Aramex, and then the dot-com bust,

which knocked out the Nasdaq,

Aramex's stock price never really took off. Thinking that the market simply did not

appreciate its value, Ghandour, along with a private equity firm from Dubai, bought

the company back from its shareholders in early 2002.

Unbeknownst to Ghandour, this move coincided with the flattening of the world. He

suddenly discovered that he not only could do new things, but he had to do new things

he had never imagined doing before. He first felt the world going flat in 2003, when

Airborne got bought out by DHL. Airborne announced that as of January 1, 2004, its

tracking and tracing system would no longer be available to its former alliance

partners. See you later. Good luck on your own.

While the flattening of the world enabled Airborne, the big guy, to get flatter, it

allowed Ghandour, the little guy, to step up and replace it. "The minute Airborne

announced that it was being bought and dissolving the alliance," said Ghandour, "I

called a meeting in London of all the major partners in the group, and the first thing

we did was found a new alliance." But Ghandour also came with a proposal: "I told

them that Aramex was developing the software in Jordan to replace the Airborne

tracking and tracing system, and I promised everyone there that our system would be

up and running before Airborne switched theirs off."

Ghandour in effect told them that the mouse would replace the elephant. Not only would

his relatively small company provide the same backroom support out of Amman that

Airborne had provided out of Seattle with its big mainframe, but he would also find

more globalpartners tofill in the holes in the alliance left by Airborne's departure.

To do this, he told the prospective partners that he would hire Jordanian

professionals to manage all the alliance's back-office needs at a fraction of the

cost they were paying to have it all done from Europe or America. "I am not the largest

company in the group," said Ghandour, who is now in his mid-forties and still full

of energy, "but I took leadership. My German partners were a $1.2 billion company,

but they could not react as fast."

How could he move so quickly? The triple convergence.

First of all, a young generation of Jordanian software and industrial engineers had

just come of age and walked out onto the level playing field. They found that all

the collaborative tools they needed to act big

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were as available to them as to Airbome's employees in Seattle. It was just a question

of having the energy and imagination to adopt these tools and put them to good use.

"The key for us/' said Ghandour, "was to come up with the technology and immediately

replace the Airborne technology, because without online, real-time tracking and

tracing, you can't compete with the big boys. With our own software engineers, we

produced a Web-based tracking and tracing and shipment management system."

Managing the back room for all the alliance partners through the Internet was actually

much more efficient than plugging everyone into Airbome's mainframe back in Seattle,

which was very centralized and had already been struggling to adapt to the new Web

architecture. With the Web, said Ghandour, every employee in every alliance company

could access the Aramex tracking and tracing system through smart PC terminals or

handheld devices, using the Internet and wireless. A couple of months after making

his proposal in London, Ghandour brought all the would-be partners together in Amman

to show them the proprietary system that Aramex was developing and to meet some of

his Jordanian software professionals and industrial engineers. (Some of the

programming was being done in-house at Aramex and some was outsourced. Outsourcing

meant Aramex too could tap the best brains.) The partners liked it, and thus the Global

Distribution Alliance was born-with Aramex providing the back room from the backwater

of Amman, where Lawrence ofArabia once prowled, replacing Airborne, which was located

just down the highway from Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Another reason Ghandour could replace Airborne so quickly, he explained, was that

he was not stuck with any "legacy" system that he had to adapt. "I could go right

to the Internet and use the latest technologies," he said. "The Web enabled me to

act big and replicate a massive technology that the big guys had invested millions

in, at a fraction of the cost. . . From a cost perspective, for me as a small guy,

it was ideal... I knew the world was flat. All my preaching to our employees as the

CEO was that we can compete, we can have a niche, the rules of the game are changing,

you don't need to be a giant, you can find a niche, and technology will enable us

to compete with the big boys."

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When January 2004 rolled around and Airborne began switching off its system, Aramex

was up and running for a seamless handoff. And because Aramex was able to run its

new system off an Internet platform, with software designed primarily by lower-cost

Jordanian programmers, installation of the new system took place virtually, without

Aramex having to send its engineers to train any of the alliance partners. Eachpartner

company could build its own client base over the Internet through the Aramex system,

do its own tracking and tracing, and be part of the new virtual global air freight

network.

"So now we are managing this global network, with forty alliance partners, and we

cover every geographic area in the world," said Ghandour. "We saved so much money. . .

With our Web-based system all you needed was a browser and a password to get into

the Aramex network, and suddenly you're inside a global shipment management system."

Aramex trained many of the employees of the other alliance companies how to use its

system by using various online channels, including voice over the Internet, online

chatting, and other virtual training tools available on Aramex's intranet-making the

training incredibly cheap.

Like UPS, Aramex has quickly moved into insourcing. Arab and foreign banks in the

Middle East have outsourced the delivery of their credit cards to Aramex; mobile phone

companies are using Aramex delivery men to collect bills on their behalf, with the

delivery men just scanning the customer's credit card and then issuing a receipt.

(Aramex may be high-tech, but it has not shrunk from using donkeys to cross military

roadblocks to deliver packages in the West Bank when Israeli-Palestinian clashes have

closed roads.)

"We are a very flat organization," Ghandour explained. "This is not traditional,

because Arabinstitutions in the private sector tend to look like the governments-very

hierarchal and patriarchal. That is not how Aramex works. There are no more than two

to three layers between me and anyone in the company. Every single knowledge worker

in this organization has a computer with e-mail and Internet access. Right here from

your computer I can access my intranet and see exactly what is happening in the

organization without my senior people having to report to me."

In sum, Fadi Ghandour took advantage of several new forms of

collaboration-supply-chaining, outsourcing, insourcing, and all the steroids- to

make his little $200-million-a-year company very big. Or, as he put it with a smile,

"I was big locally and small internationally-and I reversed that."

Rule #3: And the big shall act small... One way that big companies learn to flourish

in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their customers

to act really big.

Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman of Starbucks, says that Starbucks estimates

that it is possible to make nineteen thousand variations of coffee on the basis of

the menus posted at any Starbucks outlet. What Starbucks did, in other words, was

make its customers its drink designers and allow them to customize their drinks to

their exact specifications. Starbucks never thought of offering soy milk, Schultz

told me, until store managers started to get bombarded with demands for it from

customers, to the point where they were going to the grocery store across the street

in the middle of the day to buy cartons of soy milk. Starbucks learned from its

customers, and today some 8 percent of all the drinks that Starbucks sells include

soy milk. "We didn't dream up the different concoctions with soy milk," said Schultz,

"the customers did." Starbucks just collaborated with them. The smartest big

companies clearly understand that the triple convergence allows them to collaborate

with their customers in a totally new fashion-and, by doing so, to act really small.

The way that big companies act small is not by targeting each individual consumer

and trying to serve that customer individually. That would be impossible and

impossibly expensive. They do it by making their business, as much as possible, into

a buffet. These companies create a platform that allows individual customers to serve

themselves in their own way, at their own pace, in their own time, according to their

own tastes. They are actually making their customers their employees and having them

pay the company for that pleasure at the same time!

One of those big companies that have learned to act small in this way is E*Trade,

the online bank and brokerage house. It did so, explained

Mitchell H. Caplan, the CEO of E*Trade as well as a friend and neighbor, by recognizing

that behind all the hoopla around the dot-com boom and bust, something very important

was happening. "Some people thought the Internet was going to revolutionize

everything in the world with no limits-it was going to cure the common cold/' said

Caplan. Sure, it was hype, and it led to crazy valuations and expectations, which

eventually came crashing down. But meanwhile, with much less fanfare, the Internet

was creating "a whole new distribution platform for companies to reach consumers in

a whole new way and for consumers to reach your company in a whole new way," Caplan

said. "While we were sleeping, my mom figured out how to use e-mail and connect with

the kids. My kids were instant-messaging all their friends. My mom figured out how

to go online and check her E*Trade balances."

Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of

the "self-directed consumer," because the Internet and all the other tools of the

flat world had created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price,

experience, and service he or she wanted. Big companies that could adapt their

technology and business processes to empower this self-directed consumer could act