This is shaping up to be quite a winter of discontent. Mass layoffs at home and mass demonstrations abroad have combined to foster a seething desperation around the world that would have warmed the cockles of Dickens' Madame Defarge.
But shouting "off with their heads" only gets you so far. Whether we like it or not, the deterioration of the global economy has forced companies everywhere to take hard looks at how well they generate value. Especially in the Internet age, where your competitor may only be a mouse click away.
Infosys co-chairman: Nandan Nilekani
We Americans were first to figure this stuff out. But that was a fleeting moment in history. The rest of the world has since caught up-and in many cases surpassed us. Case in point: the success of the overseas entrepreneurs who have built multi-billion dollar outsourcing operations that have since become so integrated with the United States' technology industry.
The New York Times' Tom Friedman was spot on in his 2005 book "The World is Flat" when he argued that inexpensive and ubiquitous telecommunications have helped to foster international competition. So it is that in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst, companies like Infosys have been able to grow exponentially. (One should note that Infosys derives over half of its revenue from on-site and near-shore assignments in India.)
But this is more than just a low-cost game. When I spoke earlier this week with the company's co-founder and current co-chairman, Nandan Nilekani offered a piece of advice that every U.S. company would have heeded-had they had the opportunity for a do-over.
"All of this global growth the past few years gave us a pass on making fundamental reforms," he said. The boom times, he continued, essentially papered over the cracks in the system "that should have been addressed."
Nilekani advocates a back-to-basics approach where companies invest in their most precious asset: their human capital. How's that for a role reversal? But Infosys has taken the lessons of America's great success in high-tech to heart and spends millions of dollars annually on corporate education programs that ultimately produce a better trained cohort of employees.
Infosys spent about $400 million to build its campus in Mysore, India, where it teaches around 13,500 company "students." The follow-up course work includes yearly refresher courses. It's a coveted place to work. Infosys received 1 million applicants last year for 25,000 job postings.
Infosys may be a proverbial one-off. In a deep recession that sometimes appears close to slipping into a depression, you won't find many companies, big or small, eager to invest big bucks on education and training. Not when budgets are getting slashed and the visibility about what the next quarter may bring is opaque.
But one day--and I can't predict when--all of this will end. One wager, though, I will make: when the economic miasma lifts, watch companies that had the means and the will to invest in the best trained workforce money could buy. They're going to be ready to kick butts and take names.
More than a year ago, Pasadena Now's editor and publisher, James Macpherson, caused a minor media stir after hiring a couple of reporters in India to write up the Webcast meetings of the local city council for his online newspaper
In the year-plus since his decision, many of Macpherson's peers have had an increasingly hard time of it. (In a speech delivered earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch warned of even worse times ahead -- in no small part because of the emergence of the Internet and the haphazard way in which publishers have responded to the shift in technology.)
I haven't kept up with Pasadena Now. But in Sunday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes up her interview with Macpherson, who has now outsourced the work formerly done by the seven Pasadena staffers he fired.
"Everyone has to get ready for what's inevitable -- like King Canute and the tide coming in -- and that's really my message to the industry," the editor and publisher said. "Many newspapers are dead men walking. They're going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I'm pioneering...I have essentially been five years ahead of the world for a long time, and that's a horrible address at which to live because people look at you, you know, like you're nuts."
He's not nuts. But I wonder whether he's addressing the symptom instead of the cause. Part (most?) of the turmoil in the industry is a function of the loss of trust, as Murdoch noted in his speech, at the same time that there are now a multiplicity of alternative, trusted sources of information.
Ignoring users has exacted an unfortunately high price, something Dave Winer correctly noted in a recent post:
Listening is hard. But all people who create products for users must listen if they want to do well at making products. That includes doctors, bus drivers, mailmen, entrepreneurs, programmers, and yes, reporters and editors too. Because if you don't listen you might miss a corner-turn and end up going off a cliff, just like the news industry is doing. They see the cliff, they know they're headed for it, but they don't ask how to turn the car. They don't really want to know. I think sometimes what they want is to be missed when they lie dead in a crumpled car at the bottom of the cliff. But we don't want that to happen. Not because we love them, but because life without them is pretty hard to imagine. They should turn the corner, no matter how painful it is. But in order to do it, they're going to have to look out the front window and the mirrors and listen to the person in the passenger seat.
How long will it take for them (us?) to get it? Beats me. CNN's experiment with user-generated reporting is going through predictable growing pains. It's an encouraging harbinger but I'm reserving judgment until the likes of the Times and The Wall Street Journal offer something similar.
As if the industry needed another sign how quickly times are changing, the lightning speed with which information about the Mumbai attacks was tweeted (and "retweeted") should serve as the catalyst for creative thinking about the future.
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