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.

One had long shaggy hair. It looked a complete mess. His hair was so long it covered his eyes. He kept flicking his head to move the hair away from the front of his face – as if a fly was constantly buzzing around his face. One was quite similar to the Collies, perhaps with a shorter coat, but still quite similar. Certainly dog-like. It was even a similar black and white to the markings of Blair and Charlie’s coat. The other dog just looked plain strange. It had a face that was squashed, squashed flat with rolls of skin lolling around his cheeks and chin.

“What kind of dogs are you?” Winston asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog like any of you before, especially not around here. Are you here to work with us on the farm? Are you sure you know how to herd sheep.

The big hairy one responded first, with a warm smile on his face.

“Hello. I’m very pleased to meet you. My name is Lech. I know all about herding sheep, and my friends here do as well. I’m known as a Polish Lowland Sheepdog, or a Nizzy if you prefer. My breed has been herding sheep in Poland for centuries. I’m surprised you have never heard about us – in Poland we know all about the famous Border Collies from Scotland.”

“This is England, not Scotland.” Winston grumpily retorted. This hairy Polish beast was a bit too good, just too polite, for his own good.

“Yes of course I know that. In fact, I know that this farm is located in Bedfordshire; we are not very far from London, your capital city. An old Border Collie once taught me the history of your breed so I know all about your ancestors on the Scottish borders. You are quite a long way from home as well!” Lech carried on: “Let me introduce you to my friends here. Pandit and Mozi, why don’t you introduce yourself to the Collies?”

“Thank you brother.” The dog with the squashed face stepped forward a single pace. “Hello. I’m Mozi. I’m a Chinese Shar Pei. We have a proud history stretching back thousands of years as herding dogs and as expert guards to people and their property. The Chinese nobility have valued our protection for longer than China has been known as China. Forget about your tiny highlands in Scotland. Try herding along the Mongolian border and you know what it means to herd dumb animals.”

Mozi started scratching his body with a hind leg. The folds of skin on his body sagged and rolled with each scratch. The third dog in the makeshift line grinned and stepped forward a little. He coughed and introduced himself to the Collies.

“I am very pleased to be meeting you. My name is Pandit and I’m known as a Dhangari dog. My own heritage is Indian. To be more precise I originate from a place known as Maharashtra. That’s the name of a state in India. You may be aware of Bombay, or Mumbai as it’s known now. That’s the closest big city to my home. Well, actually Aurangabad is probably the closest big city to my home, but I guess you have never heard of the place. It’s very nice – there are some impressive caves nearby. Everyone knows Bombay… sorry Mumbai…”

Lech coughed and interrupted Pandit’s flow. It seemed he was used to his Indian friend talking too much and they had an agreed way to end these streams of canine consciousness.

Winston, Charlie, and Blair stared at the dogs – if they could be called dogs – with a sense of disbelief. They were very friendly, but they were not Collies. One had more hair than the sheep he claimed to have experience of herding. All the Collies were thinking the same thoughts without speaking. The sheep must be very strange in Poland. The Shar Pei was so majestic and controlled it appeared as if he could never have really known life on a farm.  The Indian dog seemed earnest and hard working and he looks a bit like a Collie, but he sounded very indecisive. Sheep don’t let you get away with indecision out in the field. They thrive on it.

Winston wondered out loud: “What is the farmer doing?” Just then, the farmer explained what he was doing.

“I’m glad to see you all getting along with each other. Winston, I’m leaving it up to you to ensure that these new dogs learn about the farm. They need to understand how English sheep behave and how we work around here. Make sure they all feel comfortable on the farm and make sure that all three of them learn everything they need to know. I’m depending on you to do this for me.”

So, the new dogs joined the Border Collies on Manor farm. They found another spot within the barn and created their own home there. All six dogs now slept in the barn, but in two groups of three, the English old-timers and the foreign newcomers…

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary (www.markhillary.com) is a director of the UK National Outsourcing Association and visiting lecturer at London South Bank University.

]]> http://www.myglobalcareer.com/2010/03/08/who-moved-my-job/feed/ 1 http://www.myglobalcareer.com/2009/10/19/the-invisible-rise-of-cross-border-telecommuters/ http://www.myglobalcareer.com/2009/10/19/the-invisible-rise-of-cross-border-telecommuters/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:01:14 +0000 Sharon Reed Abboud http://www.myglobalcareer.com/archives/2008/10/13/the-invisible-rise-of-cross-border-telecommuters/ Continue reading]]> 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.

The Gartner Group estimates that there are 137 million teleworkers worldwide. “This growth will mushroom as companies learn more about telework benefits and its highly advantageous return on investment, and the proliferation and use of online job boards and virtual hiring,” according to a report in Innovisons Canada.

The report contends that cross-border commuting poses “some serious competition for North American jobs, and ought to be a wake-up call to all of us.”

But to workers, this trend represents a much larger career playing field. “One of the advantages of being a cross-border telecommuter is that it can open up horizons and opportunities that could not otherwise be widely available to a lot of employees…” Ara said.

Michael M. Kiefer, General Manager for Brandprotect.com, is an American who telecommutes from Chicago for the Toronto, Canada Company. “In the virtual world, the Internet makes up for great distance, assuming you are not too many time zones off,” Kiefer said. Kiefer travels to the company headquarters” every month or so. “I think in today’s world, with today’s technology, the game is much easier,” but, he said, “Nothing makes up for face-to-face contact and group interaction. Monthly is just enough.”

Laura Harris owns an Allstate insurance company in Texas, but is engaged to a man who lives in Canada. Instead of moving her base of operations, she now runs her company from Canada. “With computers and Vonage my customers don’t even know that I don’t live in Texas. Well, they might now … but, then again, in today’s increasingly virtually-based economy, location is becoming increasingly less important.

A growing number of companies are reaching out to prospective employees who can work virtually from, well, anywhere. While there are tax and legal issues involved, today’s global marketplace has flung open the door for worldwide to Internet-based job and entrepreneurial opportunities.

In a Fast Company article, Michelle Bowman, a senior vice president at Boston-based Global Foresight Associates, predicted that in the future, “Cybership will vie for importance with citizenship. Companies will need to increase their tolerance for change, and view boundaries – whether national, corporate, or divisional – as more and more nebulous.”

“In today’s global economy we are all competing with everyone from everywhere for everything,” Ara said.

Guest blogger Sharon Reed Abboud is a freelance journalist specializing in careers and business trends. She is the author of the book All Moms Work, Short-term Career Opportunities for Long-Range Success, Capital Books.

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.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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.

Not coincidentally, this measure comes on the heels of several new free-trade agreements – and two months of subpar employment reports. Unemployment remains a mild 4.7% in the U.S., but new job creation has slowed to a trickle.

Many Americans believe that America is not keeping pace in the global economy – free trade is one of the key concerns. Last week, President Bush said that Americans are losing “confidence in our ability to compete internationally.”

Globalization, global trade and global outsourcing – possibly unemployment too – will be emotional issues in the 2008 presidential election and primaries.

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.

His book examines three controversial components of global labor: international trade, international migration and activities of multinational companies (MNCs). “I looked at wages, hours, on the job safety and labor rights, which are the concern of a number of international organizations these days,” says Flanagan. “The four main rights are the ones emphasized by these organizations: freedom of association, non discrimination, [elimination] of child labor and abolition of forced labor. Much of the work is statistical or econometric analysis that contains data on labor and working conditions.”

Global trade in services and products is a force for good, he argues, but it’s not the only driver of improving labor conditions – productivity might rise because of technology improvements. “Trade does not have a separate affect on working conditions, although it does have a separate affect on labor rights,” he says. “These rights tend to improve with improvements in capital.”

Of course, Flanagan’s take on globalization is not universally accepted. The Economist magazine disagrees with his conclusions. “Real wages are growing less than half as fast as productivity,” the magazine editorialized in late January in a cover story called Rich Man, Poor Man. The Economist’s main complaint -and it’s a valid one – is that managers are overpaid relative to workers. But is that really a case against globalization? Opponents would say that globalization has accelerated or perhaps exacerbated the problem of wage inequality. In the United States a lack of shareholder, political or regulatory concern has perpetuated the problem.

Flanagan sees the data differently. “Wage differences are almost exactly matched by labor productivity,” he contends. “In manufacturing about 90 percent of the variation in wages can be explained in variations of productivity between countries. The wages per unit of output is almost the same even through the wages are so disparate. That seems to be the most misunderstood fact in the whole globalization debate – you hear wages quoted but never the productivity side.”

The Economist concedes that automation “may play a bigger role in explaining rising wage inequality and sluggish growth of middling wages.” Everyone agrees that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell exactly which workers are being held back by technology gains or global competition.

Not to be overlooked, Forbes magazine weighs in with an article called “Why Globalization Is Good,” citing an International Monetary Fund stat showing that 200 million people have been lifted out of poverty in India and China since the 1990s in the wake of deregulated economies that fueled high GDP growth. One of the authors of that piece has a book coming out in July called The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China, and What It Means for All of Us, by Robyn Meredith.

The question, in my mind, isn’t whether globalization spins off winners or losers. What system doesn’t have a downstream impact? What I want to know is whether governments, corporations, educators and individuals are doing everything within their power to prepare workers to compete in the global economy.

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.

True or False? Globalization – it’s a meritocracy with Darwinian consequences.

The three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist persuaded at least one USC student, someone who sports a cool double-major, according to the Daily Trojan. Riaz Dini, a senior majoring in international relations and biology, said students are prepared to meet this challenge.

“The international system as we knew it in the last century wasn’t really fair. It’s becoming more democratic,” Dini told the paper. “People are getting ahead based on merit and on their own ingenuity and intelligence.”

Yes, but can anyone tell me what Dini’s career will be like in five years?

If you are planning to argue that globalization has negatively impacted the American worker, isn’t it a good idea to compile evidence, rather than espouse gut fear? I wonder how Sen. Webb would parse a decade’s worth of data about unemployment insurance claims, courtesy of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics?

What’s telling about this data is the consistency of the numbers – there’s nothing to indicate a rise in unemployment coinciding with, say, China & India’s meteoric growth in jobs and GDP in the past five years. Note that America experienced a downturn in 2001 and 2002 but that jobless claims have been decreasing ever since. No one contends that the post-millennium downturn was related to globalization; on the contrary, it coincided with a recession, 9-11-01, and the dot-com bust. The current 4.5% U.S. unemployment rate doesn’t suggest to me that we’re facing a wave of immigration that is undermining the American worker, but let’s save that debate for another day.

Yes, the global economy produces individual winners and losers. The Economist cover story “Rich man, poor man” talks about how fat cats are profiting from worldwide expansion while the average worker is not. That bears further examination. We will look at the winners and losers in the days, months and years ahead. Ultimately, however, this site exists to help you advance your global career. No one else has to fail in order for you to succeed.