The Dynamo and the Virgin

The big Reuters wire story being routed around on outsourcing these days is that China’s really, really trying to position itself as the next India, and that it is hampered by the English problem and the intellectual property problem. (Those damnable Chinese pirates!)

I was reading the various iterations of this story and thinking about Henry Adams’s reaction to the Paris Exposition in 1900 – where, as a medieval historian steeped in the mysteries of gorgeous cathedrals inspired by Virgin Mary, he is confronted with the shock of the dynamo, which bodes the harnessing of energy not fully understood even by the most sophisticated scientists of the day.

And he describes his shock as having "my historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new."

I think that is part of what we are experiencing in business – particularly a business so steeped in gentlemanly tradition (despite the reality that publishing really NEVER was that way, it certainly remains bound to the myth) – when we are confronted with outsourcing. Because it’s not simply a matter of shipping work to another country to be done more cheaply. The very issue of sending work abroad has implications beyond the immediate payoff.

There’s the 24-hour workday – where one’s productivity is suddenly doubled (or more) by a doppelganger (or three or four) in other parts of the world, and the focus becomes how much work can be squeezed into a certain period. There’s the continued segmentation and specialization of work itself – fewer generalists who see the big picture, in other words. There’s the dilution of the American economy and the dilution of the American brand of worker – very, very difficult to get one’s head around. The dilution of "work hard and you will be rewarded", where working hard is synonymous with virtue – that Puritan sense….As we more closely encounter different cultures, particularly ones so radically different such as Asian ones – well, in radical confrontations with the Other, we are forced into a confrontation with the Self.

And I really think that the world of business is not terribly cut out for that. So it’s going to be a bumpy ride while we have our historical necks broken. But not only have we learned to live with the dynamo – now we can’t live without it, and without technologies a hundred times more advanced. Ultimately, yes, the world gets smaller (flatter, as Thomas Friedman says), but there will come a point where we can’t envision living any other way.

And Chinese pirates will be a thing of the past.

Benign Girl

My youngest daughter came back from a birthday party yesterday with the requisite goody bag filled with party favors manufactured in China.

Among the toys was a little plastic cell phone. The packaging was all in pink (as was the phone itself). Bulleted on the side of the package were the selling points:

*BATTERY!
*OPERATED!
*CREATIVE!
*VARIOUS MUSIC!

The instructions were also on the package: "Beautiful girl, press any button!"

At the top, a (completely unlicensed, utterly pirated) image of Barbie. In the Barbie-esque pink font to the left, were the words "Benign Girl".

There’s a role model for ya. Truth in translation.

This morning I had a call with the CEO of B2K, the BPO-outsourcing company covered (in great depth) by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. They are located in Bangalore. What do they do…well, actually, a more appropriate question is what DON’T they do. They do tech support, customer care, software development, business analysis, and they have a virtual executive assistant team as well.

Shortly after that call ended, one of my clients called me and was discussing some product development for a particular product line that’s been suffering from some neglect lately. He told me that he wasn’t really happy with the IT infrastructure for this product.

I said, "How do you feel about India?"

He said, "I love India. They work cheap and they speak English."

Asia is a market much too huge to be ignored. It’d be nice if the images weren’t pirated and the translations were better – Benign Girl really isn’t going to play so well over here in the long run, probably because it’s too truthful – and it’d be nice if we had a better understanding of what the market is for our services there. But that’s just a matter of time. The genie’s out of the bottle. Now it’s time to see what it can do.