Globalisation & Offshoring

Western businesses will have to look to emerging economies to plug their skills gaps as their own workforces age and shrink – creating a whole new set of management challenges.

In the global business world it makes sense to recruit internationally-focused executives. So why do only a fifth of British employers agree?

Outsourcing is much more complicated than simply shunting an IT function from the West to India or the Far East – as well as being much more challenging to manage.

Complacent Westerners are seriously underestimating the threat posed by an up-and-coming generation of ambitious, well educated and imaginative Chinese managers.

With the cost of an employee in India now aything up to $US 60k per year, many multinational companies are starting to rethink their offshore plans.

The fear may be all too real, but Western workers who assume their jobs are threatened by impossibly low-wage competition from India and the Far East are often simply wrong.

Time once again to visit the Corporate Cynic as he takes an in-depth look at the unintended effects of outsourcing.

As Indian workers are toasting record pay rises, their counterparts in America are bracing themselves for a wave of job cuts.

Today's up-and-coming business leaders are a "global generation" unhindered by barriers of geography, culture or communication – but lacking in business education.

China's emergence as a powerhouse of technological innovation may mean it soon overtakes the U.S. as the principal driver of the world's economy.

With four out of 10 of the UK's top chief executives now coming from abroad, there are concerns that UK firms are not doing enough to develop home-grown talent.

Professor Richard D'Aveni has been described as a combination of Henry Kissinger and Sun Tzu. He talks to Stuart Crainer about his work and the challenges posed by emerging economies.

I've been blogging quite a bit about India in the past few weeks, noticing in particular how they're slowly but surely adopting not just the best, but also the worst aspects of Western culture.

For Britons and Americans it is all about respect. For Indians and French it is the type of work they are doing. For the Japanese, it is pay. Employee engagement takes many different forms around the world.

The British Council, long known for their promotion of proper English skills the world over, is taking a bold new initiative, which could have quite an impact across Asia.

Paging through the Times of India, I wasn't surprised to read a headline claiming that Indian IT professionals are among the worst paid in the world.

As the incidence of work-related disease rises in India, Isn't it time to admit that human beings are not meant to work 12-16 hour days 6-7 days a week just to boost the bottom lines of companies thousands of miles away?

In this era of instant global communications, American companies are far less adept at global brand management than their European counterparts. And they're suffering as a result.

A popular backlash is growing throughout the world's most developed economies against economic globalization, large corporations and excessive executive pay.

A generation of thrusting young entrepreneurs from emerging economies are snapping at the heels of today's stuffy Western business leaders – who need to be careful that they don't get left behind.

The notion that emerging economies such as India are plundering thousands of high-quality jobs through offshoring is completely unfounded, a British think-tank has claimed.

Offshore call centres are damaging reputations and customer relationships while failing to deliver the expected cost savings, financial services firms have been warned.

Sometimes there are some unexpected benefits to seeing your job get offshored to Asia. Like getting rehired on fat consultancy rates to sort out the mess the offshore team have made of what used to be your job.

The official line is that the German economy has turned the corner after years in the doldrums. But with the number of Germans emigrating hitting levels not seen since in the aftermath of the Second World War, the reality seems to be rather different.

"Always Coca-Cola". Remember that slogan? They're sure to in India, where the Times of India reported that Coke is preparing to invest $250 million dollars over the next three years.

Despite being blessed with one of the world's biggest labour pools, Indian financial services businesses are struggling to find graduates with the right management and people skills.

Packing off your call centres to somewhere cheap and far away is so passé. In fact, instead of alienating both customers and politicians, American businesses would be far better off keeping their call centre workers at home – literally.

For reasons best known to itself, SAP Germany's largest software company, has deceided that it needs to be less German and more "global". The result has been a whole lot of headaches.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but organisations that offshore operations in the hope of simply improving performance end up saving more money than those that do it because they want to slash costs.

The world may still look to America for corporate leadership, but the signs are that U.S. CEOs are becoming more isolationist – happy to offshore operations abroad but less interested in chasing growth outside North America.

Indian IT firms have been accused of misusing the U.S. H-1B visa system, the special visa category that is intended to enable the "best and brightest" foreign citizens to come to the United States as non-immigrant workers in certain specific industries.

Europe's €4bn outsourcing industry is facing a mid-life crisis as organisations find that far from saving them money, outsourcing deals end up costing them far more than they would have done had the work been kept in-house.

It seems that generous climate of Bangalore doesn't seem to have the draw it once held as a number of large European companies find a new place to camp – in their own backyard.

While many countries have rushed to embrace the perceived money-saving benefits of offshoring, the French have proudly summoned the resistance to break offshoring's momentum.

They were viewed until recently as the "soft" side of management, but issues such as corporate culture, environmental protection and knowledge management have now moved to the forefront of executive thinking.

More than four out of 10 companies in the United States achieved above-average levels of growth last year, confirming its status as the world's most dynamic economy.

Chinese workers, for so long all-but ignored by multinationals scrambling for a slice of the country's economic miracle, are starting to flex their financial muscle and demand better pay and benefits.

Western executives may complain about their businesses being under-cut by cheap labour from China, India and Eastern Europe, but managers in those countries are expected to be top of the league for pay rises this year.

China may be churning out graduates by the thousands, but serious questions are being raised about whether they have the skills to turn the nation into an economic world-beater.

American and British firms are among those best placed to tap into the booming Chinese economy, but British managers are proving slow off the mark when it comes to spotting new opportunities.

Nearly a quarter of executives in the world's largest companies believe that difficulties building a common global culture mean that their organisations are poorly equipped to succeed as global enterprises.

Popular hostility towards offshoring and increasing economic globalisation is growing in the UK as a new survey finds that eight out of 10 Britons want to see a halt in jobs moving overseas.

Large companies are growing increasingly disillusioned with the UK as an business location, with one in five considering relocating their headquarters out of the country because of high taxes.

Companies are increasingly offshoring sophisticated, mission-critical functions such as product design and research and development because they can't find the skilled staff to do the work at home.

The vast majority of big U.S companies now train workers across the world. Yet most of their training dollars remain focused on delivering education at home.

Europe's economies lag behind the U.S because they have consistently failed to invest in their knowledge base and are always playing catch-up when it comes to technological progress.

British employers have called on the European Union and India to forge a new free trade pact to boost the trade and investment between the two economic superpowers.

In 2000, EU leaders committed to the objective of making Europe 'the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world'. But six years on, a new report by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics has revealed that progress has been poor.

Imagine you are the CEO of a large U.S-based enterprise thinking about where to locate your European HQ. Do you plump for thriving Irish capital, Dublin, with a corporation tax rate of 12.5 per cent, or head to London, where you'll pay 30 per cent to the UK government?

The number of U.S workers employed by foreign companies has dropped by nearly 10 per cent in the past six years, raising fears that America could be losing its edge in the global competition to generate jobs.

As businesses become more global, a growing number are shifting to more centralised compensation and benefits structures to ensure workers and managers around the world share the same incentives.

British business are over-taxed and over-regulated, the head of the the country's largest business organisation has warned, costing the country jobs, profit, investment and prosperity.

Indian IT companies are turning themselves into mini technology universities in an effort to overcome a severe shortage of talent, according to a report in the country's Economic Times.

Despite viewing the Chinese market as one of their biggest business opportunities, a quarter of global companies still have no China strategy and only half have set up operations there.

So-called "second world" economies in Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe are overturning the world pay order and overtaking developed Western countries as the world's new pay hotspots.

Miscommunication and a lack of cross-cultural understanding are the main barriers organisations face when it comes to global sourcing and outsourcing, a new study has found.

The boom in companies outsourcing their IT is over, a U.S study has claimed, with organisations now much more likely to think more carefully and strategically before they rush operations overseas.

Britain's economy could be missing out on the skills of thousands of migrant workers from the eight European Union accession countries because of their lack of English language skills, a new report has suggested.

In the week that a worker in a Bangalore call centre operated by banking giant HSBC was arrested for allegedly supplying personal details to fraudsters who went on to steal £230,000 from 16 UK customers, Miles Brignall in the Guardian asks whether the time is up for Indian call centres.

One in five British employees feels insecure in their job because of the risk it will be offshored to a low-cost country such as India or China, new research has found.