Re: The Question: Talking Heads - Offshoring

On Sep 28, 2005, at 10:58 PM, Paul Bowers wrote:

> it's easy to pooh-pooh concerns about
> large-scale industry trends.

Actually I was pooh-pooh-ing the ability of marketing droids to predict large scale industry trends. Remember when Russia was the new land of opportunity? Or when Japan was going to take over the world? Did a marketing VP predict the dot-com bust or the Asian financial crises? Marketing gave us the Edsel and clear beer; brains and vision gave us the DC-3, the nuclear navy and satellite communications.

My own opinion is that jobs are getting off-shored for two reasons--technically illiterate management jumping on a bandwagon and the same technically illiterate management buying labor strictly based on cost. The thinking goes, 'Competition is offshoring jobs, therefore we have to offshore jobs. We're paying our staff $50/hr; offshore says they pay $25/hr therefore the bottom line demands we offshore jobs.' Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. When these same companies start outsourcing the marketing VP positions because offshore marketing VP's cost less, I'll think about changing my mind on it all.

Management in this country has been jumping from trend to trend for 25 years. Thinks about it--MBO, quality circles, ISO9000, supply side, Taguchi, leveraged buyouts, the Japanese model, six sigma, there must be hundreds. But we still have recessions, savings and loan crises, Enron, irrational exuberance, panic selling and airline management too stupid to hedge their fuel costs when there's a mid-east war. Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller may have been robber barons, but at least they knew that you can't build something lasting by following management trends.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania