Management Guru Peter Drucker on Outsourcing
Peter Drucker is not just a management guru as it is commonly
supposed. He is the very inventor of management as a subject. Plus
some more: he is an economist, sociologist, historian and visionary.
At 94, he still teaches, consults, writes -- and, envisions. Recently
he gave an interview to Fortune magazine. In it he blows away a lot of
myths. It also has a glimpse of how Drucker's very original mind views
the current hysteria over US jobs outsourced to India and other
countries.
What follows is a summary of a private mail sent by Ram Narayanan who
runs a very influential newsletter on Indo-US relations. The full
Drucker interview may be read by following this link, but you need to
be a paying subscriber to do so.
Although the early parts of the interview deal with issues that only
concern the American economy, there are many insights here about
economies in general. Drucker says that it's not true that
manufacturing jobs are leaving US shores. Labor costs are such a
little part of many advanced products, and US labor is so very skilled
and flexible, that the only jobs that are leaving, are the labor
intensive --like say, textiles-- and the knowledge oriented ones.
Manufacturing in the US has in fact doubled in the last decade. US
still has more than enough 'good' jobs on offer and every college
graduate finds one. There is a mismatch only with regard to
insufficiently trained labor. It is not so much that there aren't
jobs; it is just that the unemployed seem untrained for the jobs that
there are. Many immigrants arrive on US soil "qualified for
yesterday's jobs, which are the kinds of jobs that are going away."
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