Thomas Friedman’s book has popularized the term ‘the world is flat” and while he did write about the world of outsourcing little did he know how applicable this would be to the broader world of human resources. Certainly I did not realize this a year ago when I launched The Industry Radar as a knowledge portal focused on the world of HR and employee benefits in the United States, an industry I have been part of for over 30 years.

I remember looking at my Google Analytics stats and map the day we announced we were open for business and watched the dots appear all over the US. As the days went by those dots started appearing all over the globe. First one in the UK, then India, Malaysia, Australia and on and on. As the year has gone by visitors from over 80 countries have used The Industry Radar and on a any given day we see visitors from 15-20 different ones.

I am not sure why this surprised me when the daily work of newsmastering The Industry Radar is a truly global one – albeit digital. I start my day in my home office in Atlanta login to my RSS based content management tools – from my partner MySyndicaat (Italy ) - to edit the days posts. I then organize my newsletter using Zookoda (Australia) and take the content back home to the U.S. where we host our website and send out over 100,000 email newsletters everyday to our subscribers worldwide.

The news my audience reads everyday has travelled 20,000 miles digitally everyday before they ever read it!

Clearly many of our visitors come to The Industry Radar keep up with a country that they are business partners with or providing outsourcing services for . But as the year has gone on and the number of international visitors has grown and become more diverse there is more than that going on.

In fact Athens, Hanoi, Beijing, Nairobi, and Teheran visited yesterday.

What an odd group. The birthplace of democracy, a rising African capital, a former enemy, a communist state and the home of fundamental Islamists. What is it that these diverse nations have in common that would bring them to a site like The Industry Radar in search of information to help them?

Employees, and all the challenges that come with recruiting, retaining, managing them in a truly global economy. Apparently in this flattened world with all the cultural, political and other differences that exist at least we still share one simple but important thing – People.

One other unexpected thing that has come from this first year at The Industry Radar is my 5 year old daughter’s interest in geography. Lilly likes to come down to my office and look at the map on my computer with all the dots on it and ask me what certain countries are, tell me something about them if she has ever heard of them and often says “Daddy can we go there someday?”

I say of course we can and realize that there is no way to fathom the changes that will occur in next 20 years before she and her 5 year old pre-school and kindergarten peers around the world enter the global workforce.

The one thing I can predict though is that she and children like her around the world will be interconnected in ways that have never occurred before and that promises to be a very good thing for them, for business in general and for the world as a whole.

John Nail
Founder/Newsmaster - The Industry Radar