Archive for the 'Globalization' Category

Archives for Globalization

Who Moved my Job? is a short story about globalization and the migration of work throughout the world. I’ve written several more formal books on the subject, and my next book is entitled Talking Outsourcing so you can guess what that’s about, but I wanted to try exploring some ideas of migration by using a story.

The English sheepdogs who live on Manor farm find that they are charged with training some new foreign dogs who join them on the farm. They are eventually replaced by the newcomers and they need to find how the skills they learned in the country might be applied to life in the city.

Here is the moment when the new dogs arrive on the farm:

It was dawn. The piercing whistle of the farmer brought Winston, Charlie, and Blair running from the barn where they liked to sleep. The barn was more comfortable than the farmhouse, even though the farmer would never mind them entering the house. In the barn they had protection from the cold, the sun, fresh water, and just the occasional rat to chase when they were not working – the young rats that had yet to learn about avoiding the dogs.

The farmer was down by the house and he had three dogs there alongside him. They were all sitting in a line looking rather like sentries guarding some historic treasure. These dogs were new on the farm. None of the Collies had ever seen them before.

Winston was perplexed at the strange sight. A sheepdog should only look like a Collie. A Collie can vary in height and weight a little and can be a mixture of black and tan and white, but a Collie is always a Collie. What could the farmer be doing with these strange new animals? They were all clearly dogs, but for certain none of them was a sheepdog.

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Archives for Globalization

Fernando Ara faces an extreme virtual commute from his Orange County, CA office to Madrid, Spain. Ara is in the vanguard of worldwide cross-border telecommuters. Ara is the U.S. country manager for Redkaraoke, a social networking website, but works out of his California-based home office and travels when necessary for meetings.

Ara’s colleague, Justin Abbott, based in Baltimore, MD, heads up business development for the company. Another manager, Jose Miguel Segurra, lives in Japan. They communicate with HQ mostly via Skype.

“The biggest issues are managing between multiple time zones – from Spain, to the United States, to our Country Manager in Japan,” Abbott said. “And, of course, making sure that we all understand each other and are on the same page.”

WorldatWork, a Scottsdale, AZ, Washington, DC and Toronto, Canada-based organization, predicted in a recent report that 100 million Americans will be teleworking by 2010. Most of them will be working for companies located in the U.S.-but as the trend continues, it can be expected that as steadily increasing number of people will find cross-border opportunities.

It’s not just a virtual career choice, it’s a quiet workplace trend that goes mostly unremarked-upon by media or governments.

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Archives for Globalization

When we last encountered Shai Agassi he resigned from his position in software product development at SAP AG and was bashed by the Wall Street Journal “as a failed change agent.”

Agassi’s second act will be far more memorable than his first. He’s raised $200 million in venture capital to build a “new kind of electric car” initially for the Israeli market and then eventually to other countries in the next several years, according to a BusinessWeek article by Steve Hamm.

What strikes me as especially clever about Agassi’s initiative is his idea of separating the battery from the vehicle. “That will allow drivers to pull into a battery-swapping station, a car-wash-like contraption, and wait for 10 minutes while their spent batteries are lowered from the car and fully charged replacements are hoisted into place,” Hamm wrote.

Agassi’s company, called Project Better Place, is based in Silicon Valley. Agassi is also a blogger and certainly worth watching as an innovator. While I hope Agassi’s successful at reinventing the car, I wonder if there’s a third act in his future what it might be. We will be watching.

Here’s a video that introduces the concept.

Archives for Globalization

If you lose your job as a result of globalization, House Democrats want to extend employment benefits to you to ease your transition. There’s a good chance that Republicans, also capable of reading polls, may jump on this bandwagon, too.

Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, told the Wall Street Journal that benefits have “not kept pace with globalization.” Details are pending on Rangel’s proposed “globalization adjustment assistance” program.

In Western Europe, dislocated workers are provided substantially better benefits than Americans caught in the same situation.  ”In fiscal year 2006, Congress appropriated about $655 million for income support payments and another $220 million for training for trade-affected workers,” according to a recent GAO report on the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

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EDS, the wayward outsourcing giant, is stumbling to compete in the global economy.

Cost-cutting was the theme of Wednesday’s announcement to shareholders that the company is beefing up its workforce in low-labor-cost regions while offering “packages” to 12,000 U.S. employees. A company spokesman said, “In order to remain competitive, we must constantly rebalance our workforce on a global basis.”

Frankly, I don’t think they get it. EDS needs to do more than cut costs. It needs radical surgery to reboot its Ross Perot-spawned culture. Until the company adopts a truly global, multi-cultural, multi-national approach to services – starting with its leadership in Plano, Texas – this is a company that is destined to keep downsizing.

One visit to EDS’ headquarters – a monolith on the plains – says way too much about this top-down organization. Those who contend that America is unable to compete on a global playing field will use EDS as an exclamation point.

Archives for Globalization

Opponents of globalization contend that there is an economic race-to-the-bottom underway as first-world economies will be forced to cut their standard of living in order to compete with third-world economies. One prominent supporter of globalization counters that most of the support for this argument is anecdotal – there’s not much smoke and little substance to the charges.Neither wealthy nor poor countries have been seriously damaged as a result of globalization – that’s a key finding by Robert Flanagan, a Stanford economics professor and the author of Globalization and Labor Conditions: Working Conditions and Worker Rights in a Global Economy, (Oxford University Press, 2006). “I can’t find any evidence that supports the race-to-the-bottom view,” he says.

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Archives for Globalization

While the streets of Madrid team with anti-globalization demonstrators, a multinational corporation pits seven candidates for a senior position through a cut-throat job selection process. The winner must be chosen by the end of the day no matter the cost.

This is the premise of a terrific Spanish movie called The Method (El Método), now in limited release (with subtitles) in the U.S.

This bold film starring Eduardo Noriega took several years to reach our shores and, after this brief distribution by Palm Pictures, will go to DVD on August 14^th. The New York Times among others have compared it to Hollywood classics such as Twelve Angry Men.

Adapted from the stage, The Method mostly takes place in a conference room (with a couple of intriguing bathroom breaks); however, The Method might have been aptly called Survivor Madrid.

The candidates are put through a series of vicious tests based on the company’s “Grönholm Method,” requiring candidates to negotiate, compete, collaborate and then vote one another out of the room. No blood is spilled – this is a study of psychological violence. In the movie the MNC is portrayed as unethical – they even videotape candidates in the rest room.

Job interviews are a subject ripe for satire. In the real world it’s not unusual for corporations to put a candidate through five or more hours of tedious job interviews – often facing the same questions each time. Those of you who have experienced the horrors of an intense job selection process – and would like some validation about your feelings – this is your movie.