Franchu’s lair

Lately I have been noticing quite a lot of buzz around how the world is changing. New powers rising or showing a lot of potential… and the so called west seems to be getting nervous.

I am sure we have all heard about IT outsourcing to India, spanish speaking call-centers outsourced to South America, eastern europeans moving to western europe… and associated with those movements there are voices rising trying to encourage people to fight against it.

My position in this issue is quite different though… we are quite used to do things always in the same way, everybody tries to get into a routine and find a job that will pose the least challenges (intellectual or physical) and a big salary. Then when you settle in the routine, you lose the perspective and start to complain about how difficult is to live with your salary. Those are the people that will feel threatened when their jobs can be easily outsourced and will start voicing opposition against this trend.

Well my answer is… get used to change! Face it, the world around us is changing. We are used to see the world in this perspective:

or even…

But, what would happen if the usual representation of a world map, would be like:

By using a projection that maintains the areas in the map, we can compare the real sizes of the countries, and see that the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and Europe are not that big if we compare them with the new emerging powers… they have been silent for a long time, for many years the west has been setting the pace of the world, but maybe those days are coming to an end.

I think quite soon we will see world maps represented like:

If it gets popular, Europe will find itself almost out of the map, and psychologically very far from everything!

I was reading in the Chicago Tribune an article about a Russian Silicon Valley in Siberia and I loved one of the quotes in the articles, just because it says a lot about our world.

“If you need simple programming work done, give it to India. If you want complicated and serious tasks done, give it to China,”… “But if you want to solve an unsolvable task, give it to the Russians.”

That is why, now it is the right moment to react, but not in the way that people are thinking. We should not be scared of outsourcing or cheap manpower coming to our countries.

When I was in Russia I was surprised about the technical achievements they manage to pull off with really simple tools. We get lost if we don’t have a powerful computer running bleeding edge software, give them a pen and a piece of paper and they will give you an answer. That is what I was referring to in the beginning, we got used to do non-challenging tasks, and when we need to do something that is out of the ordinary we get blocked.

This is what should scare us, but nobody seems to care about this. We prefer to settle in our self-complacency and complain about others coming to take over our jobs.

We cannot compete if we maintain the status-quo because there are countries in which people would kill to do our jobs for half our salary. We have to move on, and find a niche in which we can create something that makes us unique. Why did we stay doing the jobs we do? Simply because it is the first step and we didn’t have competition. Now the competition has arrived, and we have two choices:

• Move on and start to create business based on the outsourcing of the jobs we are currently doing
• Wait until they kick us out of the market, they move on, and they start to outsource work to us

I’d rather be in the first wagon, the second one sounds a little bit more scary. If you are scared of changes, I recommend you a book: Who Moved My Cheese?. It is quite illustrative of the two options I have described.

Hope this post managed to make you think a little bit. I will be happy to read your views on the topic

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