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Globalisation has left companies with nowhere to find competitive advantages apart from in the quality of each individual worker, the head of one of the world's largest mining firms says today.

In a podcast for The Times, Klaus Kleinfeld, president and chief operating officer of Alcoa, the world's biggest aluminium producer, said that the internet and advanced communications had “made the world flat” and had led to such a free flow of information that the only way that companies could get ahead of competitors now was by having a better workforce.

Mr Kleinfeld, who joined Alcoa last year after serving as chief executive of Siemens, the technology conglomerate, described the way in which technology had made the world flat.

“In reality, today we work around the world almost seamlessly through the internet, through telephones. Travel has become very, very easy, there's a lot of connections and it feels like this is a natural thing.”

Information is freely available today, to the extent that amassing intellectual capital no longer constitutes a competitive advantage, he said. “If you make a statement in Australia, it will become common knowledge worldwide in a split-second. Because the internet helps, the news media help - it will instantaneously become the world's knowledge.

“That doesn't just hold true for news. It also holds true for a lot of intellectual capital that back then was nicely protected, partially because people didn't know about it. Today, if we have something we want to learn about, we go to the internet and we'll be smarter about this subject in record time. Our parents would never even have believed you could access this information.

“But that gets you to another point: what does that mean for competition? The very substance of competitive advantage for many businesses is freely available around the world. It actually holds true for most industries that ... they have changed in such a way that the only sustainable competitive advantage, probably, is the type of people you have and the way they work together.”

He added: “If that is so, the biggest question becomes: how can you attract the best and brightest around the world? Coming from the pockets of excellence, how do you make yourself, your company an interesting company, the one that they'd love to continue to work at?”

The impact of increased technology means that workers can work anywhere in the world, he said. Many aspects of research and development often are carried out with the aid of computer-aided design machines by workers who can then share the things that they design with colleagues.

“The colleague might sit just around the corner, but it doesn't really matter where the colleague sits - the colleague could as well sit in India. The colleague could sit in St Petersburg or in Siberia. The work is still the same - you can seamlessly work together. The implication of this is it doesn't really matter where the person sits, as long as the brain is the right brain and the passion is the right thing.”

However, Mr Kleinfeld cautioned that a fragmented global workforce threw up problems of integration and that despite recent technological advances, personal interaction would remain the key for businesses to succeed.

He said: “The question is: how do you make those great individuals work together as a team around the world - because they literally will be sitting around the world - and how do you develop trust in those team members that stretches over the Atlantic that is strong enough to overcome time differences and override misunderstandings?

“My impression is technology can do a lot, but it cannot substitute the personal relationship that has to be built. And trust only grows when you really know the person, in person. Once that part has happened, then probably modern media, modern devices, can compensate for a lot.

“But in the early stage to build the trust, and then also later on to continue to maintain the trust, personal meetings will never be fully substituted.”

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