Integrated Man

2007/11/04 Random Reflections on...voting our conscience

....Obama,
....Breaking the Hillary Lock
....Breaking the Guiliani Lock
....The Walmart Way

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During this week's Democratic Presidential Candidate debates, Barach Obama declared his willingness to meet face to face with the Iranian leadership to find a resolution to our issues.   No doubt some people will call this approach naive.  Some people will call this approach weak.  Some people will call it pointless because the Iranians are too stubborn and close-minded to negotiate anything with anything but a bomb.  They're not like our President!  I have a slightly different take.

Outsourcing our future

2007/10/27

David Brooks' column in today's New York Times,The Outsourced Brain, touches on an interesting dichotomy. The advantages of our technology that expand our capabilities on the one hand, also have a curious way of rendering us more vulnerable.  While Mr. Brooks addresses this issue on a personal level, it has some profound relevance on social, civic and organizational levels.

The theory of outsourcing as it has evolved in business over the past twenty five years is to focus on your 'core competencies', and leave everything other than those core competencies to others who possess greater efficiencies or economies of scale or competence to execute them.  In the beginning, this was little more than a ruse employed by some corporations to downsize internally to create a lean and mean image for investors and to shed costly internal staff for less expensive 'external staff' (who, coincidentally, were often the same people they previously employed).