Are you ready to compete, really compete, globally?

The world is flat, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman professes in his best selling book of the same name.

Recently, on a programming project with programmers from India, I got a bird's eye view of the new global economy. My take: The world is flat, if not exactly smooth.

First, some background on today's international economics lesson. A client approached me late last year and asked me to manage a small programming project. He had heard great things about a programming company in Bombay, India, from a friend.

I was reluctant. I've seen many hardworking, smart Americans looking for jobs in the past six years as more and more technology jobs have moved overseas.

My client sensed my hesitation. He asked me to reserve judgment until we called a friend who had just completed a large Web site with the Indian programmers.

The friend had sought help from India after his project with an American programming company became mired in delays, cost overruns and legal wrangling. Disgusted, he trashed the project and set out to look for a better way.

"I just realized, as Thomas Friedman says, 'the world is flat,' and this project could be done anywhere in the world," he told us.

The small Indian programming company he hired recreated his Web site from scratch, in roughly half the time and one third the cost of the American group, he said. But the real attraction was not the money: It was that working with the company was a joy.

This is the startling revelation in Friedman's book. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is not being driven by Fortune 500 corporations, governments or giant trade groups such as the World Bank. Instead, at the heart of the new globalization in the past six years, you'll find desktop freelancers, small businesses and innovative startups all over the world (especially in India and China).

They compete not just with low-wage labor but with quality designs and can-do attitudes.

My client convinced me that this would be an "interesting experiment" with a chance to view globalization in progress.

Our project was simple. We wanted to take data from his company database server and post a few dozen fields on a secure Web site for clients to access.

We met in December and outlined the project in an hour.

We submitted our proposal to the president of the Indian company via e-mail.

Right from the beginning, we were impressed with the ease of doing business with them.

The company president was articulate, easy going, direct and specific. He didn't require a detailed, lawyer-proof spec of every line of code we needed.

Instead, he gave us a timeline, a project outline and two choices -- a flat fee or monthly rate for full-time programmer with a project manager, based on our two-page description.

We penned the deal with a simple contract and paid via credit card on the Web.

We spent a good deal of time learning how to communicate at first. Telephone communication didn't work well, because, as the Indian project manager said, I had "very strong accent" (Me?) that they had a hard time understanding, even though they spoke English well.

After some frustrating calls, I realized it was best to correspond via e-mail so they had time to review and comprehend technical concepts.

I also spent a lot of time explaining things that I take for granted with Americans: standard concepts, terms and formats, for example.

The most surprising thing is that I didn't find the programmers to be very resourceful: every time they hit a stumbling block (finding a field, missing a calculation) they looked to me for answers instead of trying to resolve the problem on their own.

On the other hand, I've never worked with harder working, more polite or more easygoing people. Every deadline I set, they met. Revisions came back overnight, sometimes in hours. I never heard a complaint, an excuse, or an answer that contained any form of "no." In fact, they constantly followed up to make sure I was satisfied with their work.

"Mr. Brad, are you pleased with our progress?" was a frequent question.

When it was all done, my client figured that between my fees and the programmers, the project cost half or less what an American company would have charged. He was delighted with the results.

The project had a bumpy start but a smooth landing.

The world is indeed flat. The question is this: Is your business ready to compete in the new global economy?