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Fuqua: Offshoring about Talent, not Cost

Here’s a report you’ll be interested in: The Globalization of White-Collar Work: The Facts and Fallout of Next-Generation Offshoring from Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and Booz Allen Hamilton.

The news? Apparently offshoring is no longer “all about moving jobs elsewhere; increasingly, it’s about sourcing talent everywhere.”

And: “…what used to be a tactical labor cost-saving exercise is now a strategic imperative of competing for talent globally. White-collar work can be performed where it makes the most sense and saves the most cents. More important, a looming shortage of technically trained talent, such as engineers and computer scientists, in advanced economies will require the ability to source and manage such talent globally.”

Here are the 5 main points:

1. Labor arbitrage is giving way to accessing talent as the primary driver of next-generation offshoring.

2. Offshoring high-skilled functions does not replace jobs onshore.

3. Companies look elsewhere because they can’t get it at home.

4. Where you offshore depends on what you offshore.

5. The obstacles to successful offshoring are increasingly internal and organizational.

The reports also says that higher skilled jobs (like R&D, Marketing, and Design) won’t go away because of this growing global talent shortage. Instead firms will compete globally for brain power, regardless of location.

Sorry, I don’t buy that. China’s working hard on educating the next generation of designers, and in India you’re going to see the next generation of innovation. (I’ll get John Hagel to talk about this soon.)

Add comment December 25th, 2006

Chris Anderson: “The web is a serial killer”

Wired’s Chris Anderson writes about the effect of the Internet on media industries in the Economist’s The World in 2007:

“The web takes its victims one at a time. First, in the mid-1990s, print media started to feel the terrifying effect of losing their monopoly on publication…in the early 2000s, the same thing happened to music…Now it’s television’s turn. In 2007 TV will have its first “music moment”—the realisation that a core audience (the 18-34-year-old male) has moved online, possibly for good.”

The key insight: “Short, user-created videos are creating a new kind of watching experience, one more about “snacking” than half-hour sitcoms.”

This is all about building future business models around attention spans. No one has time to read Harvard Business Review, or listen to an entire music CD, or watch the whole movie.

Our attention span is now somewhere between 3 to 5 minutes. That’s the size your idea-bite has to be if you’re going get heard at all.

Add comment December 25th, 2006