Tara Hunt’s latest post relating her visit to India for BarCampBangalore should be required reading for U.S. business leaders in companies large and small. Here are the money quotes:

…Friedman way underestimated it.

Believing [that India only provides cheap and plentiful labor while the Western world owns creative engineering] will be that ethnocentric idea that leads to the dive of the North American economy. Far from being merely the rooms full of workhorse coding monkeys, performing the mundane tasks, the ideas coming out of BarCampBangalore are better than any I’ve heard at US camps.

The key here is to understand that, in the essence of the chunky long tail, there are markets out there that have more potential than we could ever dream of in North America. Untapped. Underrepresented. And unlimited. And, although now we in North America see ourselves as the default and everyone else as the ‘other’ (I won’t go into backing this statement up here, but we certainly can have a conversation about it to come), it won’t be long until we realize that we are dead wrong. The western countries represent the smaller piece of the online pie.

I attended a meeting last month during which the implications of Friedman’s book were discussed. Much of the conversation centered around India and other developing countries as solely a source of cheap technical talent. I told the group that, to me, Friedman’s flat world represents not only access to new labor pools, but also access to new customer markets. One of the attendees, the owner of a small technology services firm, stated matter-of-factly that “small companies don’t want [access to foreign markets].” I think my jaw dropped. I sure hope, for the sake of our country’s future, that his mindset isn’t prevalent among small companies here in the U.S.