Summary of Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get inside. For me, an inveterate traveler and foreign correspondent, life is like room service: you never know what you’re going to find outside your door.

#2 The foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times is the best job in the world. I get to travel anywhere and have attitudes about what I see and hear. But I had to decide which attitudes to use, and what would be the lens, the perspective, the organizing system through which I would look at the world.

#3 I began my column as a tourist without an attitude. I was not just in some messy, incoherent, and indefinable post–Cold War world. I was in a new international system called globalization.

#4 The Cold War was an international system that was characterized by division. The world was a divided-up, chopped-up place, and both your threats and opportunities grew out of who you were divided from.