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February 2005 Business without Borders
Compiled by Cathy Castillo Whether it’s computer technical support or product design going offshore, or concern that the United States now ranks 19th in the world in math and science education, the effects of globalization are a frequent topic of discussion. Here’s a quick look at what some speakers at the Business School have said in the past year.From an outsourcing panel discussion cosponsored by the Sloan Master’s Program and the World Affairs Council, October 2004: We have to find real solutions, but if we’re running off into a protectionist
mode … what is frustrating about that—other than what goes around comes back at
us—is that it means we’re taking our eye off of the ball about what we should be
doing constructively together to make sure that we have a climate where we can
compete and where we will win. The lack of transparency and information make the whole issue next to
impossible to attack. We don’t know what we’re talking about. The distribution of jobs is making social mobility more difficult. It is an
incredibly unfair competition for the people with fewer resources. We are gaining jobs where proximity to U.S. innovation is important; we're
losing jobs where that proximity is not important. From the Global Business and Global Poverty Conference, May 2004: The United States economy has been incredibly resilient. If you look back,
the aerospace defense industry basically fell apart in the late eighties, and
hundreds of thousands of people lost their job when the Berlin Wall came down.
Guess what? Within three to five years, most of those people were re-employed,
and in the nineties the economy went through one of the best decades we’ve ever
seen. From the Healthcare and Biotechnology Symposium, March 2004: From 40 to 60 percent of postdocs in the United States are from the People’s
Republic of China and Taiwan. In 10 years, there will be a reverse brain drain
in U.S. biotech. The people who will be leaving are the same people who are
doing our best research here. From a View from the Top speech, October 2003: India and China are graduating more computer science majors than we are in
the United States, and that’s scary. If you look out a number of years and look
at K–12 math and science, we’re behind India and China. From the Technology Industry Conference, April 2004: At the macro level, low cost [labor] is an excellent strategy, but it is not
a sustainable position for an entire country. You are not going to tell your
workers your objective is to pay less next month than this. The cost of
employing people in Bangalore has shot up 100 percent in the past three years. …
A new kind of entrepreneurship will develop where teams will break away from
being subsidiaries of a U.S. firm. Doing the work for somebody else is fine, but
eventually they will create a kind of Silicon Valley culture and will start to
develop products for the Western market, because they will have the necessary
understanding of that market. |
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