第 70 页

if we opened the border with Austria." Imagine if the Soviet Union were frozen in

place. Imagine-imagine if East German citizens, young and old, men and women, were

so emboldened by seeing their neighbors flee to the West that one day they just swarmed

that Berlin Wall and started to tear it down? Some people must have had a conversation

just like that, and because they did, millions of Eastern Europeans were able to walk

out from behind the Iron Curtain and engage with a flattening world. It was a great

era in which to be an American. We were the only superpower, and the world was our

oyster. There were no walls. Young Americans could think about traveling, for a

semester or a summer, to more countries than any American generation before them.

Indeed, they could travel as far as their imagination and wallets could take them.

They could also look around at their classmates and see people from more different

countries and cultures than any other class before them.

Nine-eleven, of course, changed all that. It showed us the power of a very different

kind of imagination. It showed us the power of a group of hateful men who spent several

years imagining how to kill as many innocent people as they could. At some point bin

Laden and his gang literally must have looked at one another and said, "Imagine if

we actually could hit both towers of the World Trade Center at the exact right spot,

between the ninety-fourth and ninety-eighth floors. And imagine if each tower were

to come crashing down like a house of cards." Yes, I am sorry

443

to say, some people had that conversation, too. And, as a result, the world that was

our oyster seemed to close up like a shell.

There has never been a time in history when the character of human imagination wasn't

important, but writing this book tells me that it has never been more important than

now, because in a flat world so many of the inputs and tools of collaboration are

becoming commodities available to everyone. They are all out there for anyone to grasp.

There is one thing, though, that has not and can never be commoditized - and that

is imagination.

When we lived in a more centralized, and more vertically organized, world -where

states had a near total monopoly of power-individual imagination was a big problem

when the leader of a superpower state -a Stalin, a Mao, or a Hitler-became warped.

But today, when individuals can easily access all the tools of collaboration and

superempower themselves, or their small cells, individuals do not need to control

a country to threaten large numbers of other people. The small can act very big today

and pose a serious danger to world order-without the instruments of a state.

Therefore, thinking about how we stimulate positive imaginations is of the utmost

importance. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the IBM computer scientist, put it to me:

We need to think more seriously than ever about how we encourage people to focus on

productive outcomes that advance and unite civilization-peaceful imaginations that

seek to "minimize alienation and celebrate interdependence rather than

self-sufficiency, inclusion rather than exclusion," openness, opportunity, and hope

rather than limits, suspicion, and grievance.

Let me try to illustrate this by example. In early 1999, two men started airlines

from scratch, just a few weeks apart. Both men had a dream involving airplanes and

the savvy to do something about it. One was named David Neeleman. In February 1999,

he started JetBlue. He assembled $130 million in venture capital, bought a fleet of

Airbus A-320 passenger jets, recruited pilots and signed them to seven-year contracts,

and outsourced his reservation system to stay-at-home moms and retirees living around

Salt Lake City, Utah, who booked passengers on their home computers.

444

The other person who started an airline was, as we now know from the 9/11 Commission

Report, Osama bin Laden. At a meeting in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in March or April

1999, he accepted a proposal initially drawn up by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the

Pakistan-born mechanical engineer who was the architect of the 9/11 plot. JetBlue's

motto was "Same Altitude. Different Attitude." Al-Qaeda's motto was "Allahu Akbar,"

God is great. Both airlines were designed to fly into New York City-Neeleman's into

JFK and bin Laden's into lower Manhattan.

Maybe it was because I read the 9/11 report while on a trip to Silicon Valley that

I could not help but notice how much Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spoke and presented himself

as just another eager engineer-entrepreneur, with his degree from North Carolina

Agricultural and Technical State University, pitching his ideas to Osama bin Laden,

who comes off as just another wealthy venture capitalist. But Mohammed, alas, was

looking for adventure capital. As the 9/11 Commission Report put it, "No one

exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh

Mohammed (KSM), the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks. . . Highly educated and

equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safe house, KSM applied

his imagination, technical aptitude and managerial skills to hatching and planning

an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car

bombing, political assassination, aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning,

and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives . . .

KSM presents himself as an entrepreneur seeking venture capital and people . . . Bin

Laden summoned KSM to Kandahar in March or April 1999 to tell him that al-Qaeda would

support his proposal. The plot was now referred to within al-Qaeda as the 'planes

operation.'"

From his corporate headquarters in Afghanistan, bin Laden proved to be a very deft

supply chain manager. He assembled a virtual company just for this project-exactly

like any global conglomerate would do in the flat world-finding just the right

specialist for each task. He outsourced the overall design and blueprint for 9/11

to KSM and overall financial management to KSM's nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who

coordinated the dispersal of funds to the hijackers through wire transfers,

cash, traveler's checks, and credit and debit cards from overseas bank accounts. Bin

Laden recruited from the al-Qaeda roster just the right muscle guys from Asir Province,

in Saudi Arabia, just the right pilots from Europe, just the right team leader from

Hamburg, and just the right support staff from Pakistan. He outsourced the pilot

training to flight schools in America. Bin Laden, who knew he needed only to "lease"

the Boeing 757s, 767s, A32Os, and possibly 747s for his operation, raised the

necessary capital for training pilots on all these differentaircraft from a syndicate

of pro-al-Qaeda Islamic charities and other Muslim adventure capitalists ready to

fund anti-American operations. In the case of 9/11, the total budget was around

$400,000. Once the team was assembled, bin Laden focused on his own core

competency-overall leadership and ideological inspiration of his suicide supply

chain, with assistance from his deputies Mohammed Atef and Ayman Zawahiri.

You can get the full flavor of the bin Laden supply chain, and what an aggressive

adopter of new technology al-Qaeda was, by reading just one entry from the December

2001 U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia's official indictment

of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called nineteenth hijacker from 9/11. It reported the

following: "In or about June 1999, in an interview with an Arabic-language television

station, Osama bin Laden issued a ... threat indicating that all American males should

be killed." It then points out that throughout the year 2000, all of the hijackers,

including Moussaoui, began either attending or inquiring about flight school courses

in America: "On or about September 29, 2000, Zacarias Moussaoui contacted Airman

Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, using an e-mail account he set up on September

6 with an Internet service provider in Malaysia. In or about October 2000, Zacarias

Moussaoui received letters from Infocus Tech, a Malaysian company, stating that

Moussaoui was appointed Infocus Tech's marketing consultant in the United States,

the United Kingdom and Europe, and that he would receive, among other things, an

allowance of $2,500 per month . . . On or about December 11, 2000, Mohammed Atta

purchased flight deck videos for the Boeing 767 Model 300ER and the Airbus A320 Model

200 from the Ohio Pilot Store ... In or about June 2001, in Norman, Oklahoma, Zacarias

Moussaoui made inquiries

446

about starting a cropdusting company . . . On or about August 16, 2001, Zacarias

Moussaoui, possessed, among other things: two knives; a pair of binoculars; flight

manuals for the Boeing 747 Model 400; a flight simulator computer program; fighting

gloves and shin guards; a piece of paper referring to a handheld Global Positioning

System receiver and a camcorder; software that could be used to review pilot

procedures for the Boeing 747 Model 400; letters indicating that Moussaoui is a

marketing consultant inthe United States for Infocus Tech; a computer disk containing

information related to the aerial application of pesticides; and a hand-held aviation

radio."

A devout Mormon, who grew up in Latin America where his father was a UPI correspondent,

David Neeleman, by contrast, is one of those classic American entrepreneurs and a

man of enormous integrity. He never went to college, but he has started two successful

airlines, Morris Air and JetBlue, and played an important role in shaping a third,

Southwest. He is the godfather of ticketless air travel, now known as e-ticketing.

"I am a total optimist. I think my father is an optimist," he said to me, trying to

explain where his innovative genes came from. "I grew up in a very happy home . . .

JetBlue was created in my own mind before it was created on paper." Using his

optimistic imagination and his ability also to quickly adopt all the latest technology

because he had no legacy system to worry about, Neeleman started a highly profitable

airline, creating jobs, low-cost travel, a unique onboard, satellite-supported

entertainment system, and one of the most people-friendly places to work you can

imagine. He also started a catastrophe relief fund in his company to help employee

families who are faced with a sudden death or catastrophic illness of a loved one.

Neeleman donates $1 of his salary for every $1 any employee puts in the fund. "I think

it is important that people give a little," said Neeleman. "I believe that there are

irrevocable laws of heaven that when you serve others you get this little buzz." In

2003, Neeleman, already a wealthy man from his JetBlue stock, donated about $120,000

of his $200,000 salary to the JetBlue employee catastrophe fund.

In the waiting room outside his New York City office, there is a color photo of a

JetBlue Airbus flying over the World Trade Center. Neeleman

447

was in his office on 9/11 and watched the Twin Towers burn, while his own JetBlue

airliners were circling JFK in a holding pattern. When I explained to him the

comparison/contrast I was going to make between him and bin Laden, he was both

uncomfortable and curious. As I closed up my computer and prepared to leave following

our interview, he said he had one question for me: "Do you think Osama actually

believes there is a God up there who is happy with what he is doing?"

I told him I just didn't know. What I do know is this: There are two ways to flatten

the world. One is to use your imagination to bring everyone up to the same level,

and the other is to use your imagination to bring everyone down to the same level.

David Neeleman used his optimistic imagination and the easily available technologies

of the flat world to lift people up. He launched a surprising and successful new

airline, some profits of which he turns over to a catastrophe relief fund for his

employees. Osama bin Laden and his disciples used their twisted imagination, and many

of the same tools, to launch a surprise attack, which brought two enormous symbols

of American power down to their level. Worse, they raised their money and created

this massive human catastrophe under the guise of religion.

"From the primordial swamps of globalization have emerged two genetic variants,"

observed Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani-one is al-Qaeda and the other are companies like

Infosys or JetBlue. "Our focus therefore has to be how we can encourage more of the

good mutations and keep out the bad."

I could not agree more. Indeed, that effort may be the most important thing we learn

to do in order to keep this planet in one piece.

I have no doubt that advances in technology-from iris scans to X-ray machines-will

help us to identify, expose, and capture those who are trying to use the easily

available tools of the flat world to destroy it. But in the end, technology alone

cannot keep us safe. We really do have to find ways to affect the imagination of those

who would use the tools of collaboration to destroy the world that has invented those

tools. But how does one go about nurturing a more hopeful, life-affirming, and

tolerant

imagination in others? Everyone has to ask himself or herself this question. I ask

it as an American. I stress this last point because I think itstarts first and foremost

by America setting an example. Those of us who are fortunate to live in free and

progressive societies have to set an example. We have to be the best global citizens

we can be. We cannot retreat from the world. We have to make sure that we get the

best of our own imaginations-and never let our imaginations get the best of us.

It is always hard to know when we have crossed the line between justified safety

measures and letting our imaginations get the best of us and thereby paralyzing