You might like these articles though:
(Vanity) Another Look at Outsourcing:
(*)McKinsey’s motives in this, however, may not be as pure as the wind-driven snow, or even the silt-ridden Ganges. According to an article from The Times of India, McKinsey is being paid to generate jobs in India: “The Karnataka government would like to see more jobs created in these areas and has mandated consultancy firm McKinsey to formulate a strategy to generate one million jobs by 2008.” QED.
(Vanity) A Falling Tide Grounds All Boats:
There are a number of reasons which have been given in the past for the desirability and the “inevitability” of offshoring. First, it was the wages:
But now it has changed; see the Jan. 30, 2006 Business Week on “The Future of Outsourcing” :
Up to now, the primary motivation of corporate bean-counters has been to take advantage of the huge wage gap between industrialized and developing nations. Big layoffs at home were usually the result.
But now, a more strategic view of global sourcing is starting to emerge. The new buzzword is "transformational outsourcing". Many companies are discovering that off shoring is really about growth - making better use of skilled US staff, and even creating new types of jobs in the US. The labor savings from global sourcing can still be substantial. But it's small compared to the enormous gains in efficiency, productivity, quality, and revenues that can be achieved by fully leveraging offshore talent.
NOW it's making sense. The shift from short-sighted, narrow-minded local-job protection, to true business use of global resources, stimulating innovative talents, partnering of complementary knowledge resources. Ubiquitous broadband communications makes this possible.
In other words, they are admitting the the cost savings weren’t “really” the reason?
Or from the February 17, 2006 Business week interview with the CEO of India’s Cognizant Technologies:
Outsourcing started as a way for companies to realize the benefits of lower costs. Later, they realized they could improve the quality of much of their work by taking advantage of excellent workforces. Now they are coming to understand that companies like Cognizant can help them assemble teams and projects much faster than they could in the U.S. That's the real value, time to market. It can take six months to assemble a team in the U.S. We can have a problem solved in six months.
Read that again. “Now they are coming to understand, …that’s the real value, time to market.” So were they lying before, about low costs, and they have to come up with a new rationale? Or have wages in the Third World suddenly risen to match those in the States, but the Americans are now just too slow?
So if the reasons for outsourcing cannot be consistently articulated, even by the CEO’s of the outsourcing firms themselves, what is going on here? I came across the following article, again from Business Week, Feb. 28, 2006:
While there are no numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests that scores, perhaps hundreds, of former GE and McKinsey executives and consultants play key roles as both suppliers of outsourced services and customers for them. ``Every time we have an outsourcing forum, it's like a GE and McKinsey alumni association meeting,'' says Sunil Mehta, vice-president of NASSCOM, India's software industry association.
In other words, there is a large element of the “old boy’s network” here. Read the Feb. 28 article, there’s a lot to it.
Good for you in a strong reply to a snarky comment.
Exxon is another that created a gladiator pit by culling the bottom almost constantly. For the winners it is a wonderful place. For the rank and file it can be pretty miserable. They hire the cream of the crop. People who have done well their whole lives and throw them into a full blown upper 10% of performers crucible. The winning credentials are not just smarts, they are some intangibles that you have or don’t have and if you don’t have them and are a lifetime achiever you self-fire. That is why there are so many, at least once, were so many ex-Exxoners who start their own companies and are otherwise VERY successful in other places that are not Exxon.
I work with GE, great technology support, engineering is a separate ladder and leadership from business. Business though, the customer does come second. They dodge and weave in the division I work with but the global research center people keep telling me this is not the GE way. I remain to be convinced.
The pay gap between the rank and file and executive suite is obscene. The executive suite is completely full of themselves. Their greed is endless. They remind me of a German Sheppard we had that would not let the horses eat the corn shucks. They have allocated themselves more money than they can possibly spend wisely and placed themselves on a pedistal. They make me vomit.
McKinsey? Why bring in a gang of long legged, bright attractive girls led by a personable and savvy executive suite schmoozer to take your staff time to educate the girls about your business and then tell you, the executive, how to do the job of organizing and leading the company you should have been doing in the first place? Pretty weak leadership isn’t it? How can the likes of McKinsey or Boston Consulting make your company unique and excel by giving you the same formularly advice they have been giving your competition? Who thinks that is a good plan. Hold up your hand. I have seen it all in action over the last few decades of downsizing, right sizing, flattening and destruction of American industry.
With their “new normal” I wonder what the X and Millenial generations will do when the Boomers leave? I wonder if it is possible to do worse? How will they lead and manage? I have learned that our normal, our perception all manner of things is from our experience and seldom from our learning. Even if we are taught history what sticks is what we experience. What have generation X and Millenial experienced that shapes their version of normal? To list a few:
1. Crushing low interest rates
2. Little inflation or growth
3. Regulation, regulation and more regulation, they see it as normal and don’t oppose it much.
4. Fear mongering of globull warming and how we destroy the planet.
5. Green programs for their own sake that do not have a cost to benefit ratio but “feel good”
6. X are the latch key kids, loners
7. Millenials are the team kids and everybody gets a trophy and exceptionalism is scorned
8. A largely warped view from pop culture and media of the family and man-woman relationships.
9. A nation constantly at war but the war does not involve 99% of them directly
10. A nation rapidly losing its identity by an invasion of dependents that don’t share our language or culture and borders that are disappearing.
11. Instant technology but decay of personal quality communication
12. Like this, the ability to hide behind the internet and become less human
What else is in their experience base of “normal”. Whatever it is is out future.