When the village becomes the world!

As a child I heard stories about how every village was self-sufficient in itself and catered to its own basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. History books revealed stories of how the cobbler, potter, farmer, teacher, pujari, king co-existed in the eco-system of the village and lent it a sense of completeness and fulfillment.

As time passed, people went from one village to another and started trading items and improved quality of living. This paradigm went on expanding and today the world has emerged into a truly global village. Every country interacts with another for satisfying even basic needs let alone many things far beyond the basics. Food, garments, furnishing, vehicles, labour everything is now exchanged more than anytime before in the history of this world.

Globalization has made the world flatter and smaller. The world now operates like one mighty village where someone is working to meet the needs of someone else in the other corner of the world and where openness encourages cultural exchanges and ideas, best practices from distinct faraway traditions are assimilated to improve living and working conditions.

So long as these exchanges are not based on the "Money" factor, things look really good. The moment money becomes the sole reason for the exchange; things begin to become complicated from a "human" perspective; albeit, from a "business" angle things are still great perhaps. Just to illustrate this point consider the outsourcing story of today. So long as the outsourcing will genuinely improve quality and efficiency, everyone stands to benefit.

But, initially the decision to outsource is based on costs! The outsourcee gets paid slightly lesser than the current costs, thereby keeping both the outsourcer and the outsourcee happy. Over time, the need to optimize on costs still remains and more is sought out of the outsourcee. Before the outsourcing started, skills existed within the outsourcer's domain, but once the skill is outsourced the outsourcer seeks cost savings out of the outsourcee - giving rise to slogshops, where eventually to retain business the workforce at the outsourcee's end is made to work harder with tighter margins and constraints.

Although it looks like the outsourcer has gained - well, yes, the outsourcer gained monetarily in the short term, but in the longer term has lost the skills to do that job and be self-sufficient. The conventional method of inducting youngsters into the organization and training them to take on these roles would yield the same benefits from a pure cost angle. In fact, it would also help retain skills.

The outsourcee looks like they have gained - initally, since they started getting paid for the work they did, but in the long run, the outsourcee becomes a slogshop adding little value spending little effort in improving skills/offerings, increasing efficiency etc.

It seems like until avenues are new and processes are evolving outsourcers want to keep those jobs with them, and once things are evolved and task is business as usual, the process is outsourced later. This is the same situation that the world went through when machines were invented and people were replaced by machines. At that time, people gave up doing the mundane and tiresome tasks and instead started to make more machines! Similarly today, the outsourcer needs to ensure newer avenues are being harvested alongside to provide a means of future occupation for existing and upcoming resources.

Even if the outsourcer's population density showed a downward trend balance will not be maintained; because that would mean fewer people using the services of the outsourcer's business over time and a further stretch on costs! At the outsourcee's end, genuine talent may end up getting wasted in a slogshop, so long as avenues to use such talent are mined for alongside. If genuine talent ends up spending effort in a slogshop, then likely chances are that this talent will improve and invent new methods and ways of doing things thus leading to more people having no work!

Balance is not easy to achieve , there are many factors like reduced mortality, increased population that make this new world order a complex equation. Self-sufficiency today has expanded to mean being self-sufficient at the global level, leaving little margin for error. If one end of the chain collapses, it is a ripple effect across. This is true of many other phenomena that were limited to the village level earlier. Much thought needs to be invested to determine the focus of this changing world. An individual, organization or nation cannot think about growth and improvement from a localized perspective. Just as self-sufficiency has become global in perception, growth needs to be perceived in totality, from a global standpoint.

United we stand, divided we fall, could not be a more absolute truth than it is today!