Outsourced!

Tuesday and it’s the last day of the month. I am awake at the usual time and I see that the rain has stopped for a little while. The wind is still with us and will continue to be blustery for most of the week. But it was the rain that was giving us a problem with our satellite connection and that was as bad as I have ever seen it.

Since it was raining yesterday, I was able to finish two books and get them off of my reading table. And of course I have a few more to replace them; Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. And The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman.

For most people, I’m sure that my reading habits are perplexing if not annoying. Normally, I will be reading 3 or more books at the same time, savoring a small amount out of each one and then putting it down. I do the same with magazines, taking quite a long time to work my way through them. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I do this because I usually read too fast. Reading a little bit at a time forces me to re-read quite often and that’s a good thing.

Last night I was reading Friedman’s book and found it to be quite fascinating (filled with facts) and so I kept reading longer than usual. In the first chapter he spends some time describing “outsourcing” and how it works in this flat world of ours. For instance, I found out that there is a growing business in the reading of x-rays. Radiologists in India are contracted to read x-rays while your own doctor is sleeping soundly at home. And there is “homesourcing”, where work-at-home moms in Utah, over 400 of them, work as reservation clerks for JetBlue Airlines. Cool.

And then I read about the city of Dalian. I had never read about it before; even the name was unfamiliar. Shame on me! But this is where Japan meets China every day in a world of commerce. And it happens to be where a large number of multi-national firms are investing. One reason for the popularity is the huge population of educated citizens. With 22 universities and over 200,000 students, they are in a good position to attract even more of the world’s business.

We ignore these facts at our own peril.