Outsourced

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I thought of the class this past weekend. I rented the movie "Outsourced". It was an interesting comedy depicting an American man, Kyle who sells products over the phone. His job was being outsourced to India, but his boss selected him to be the tech project manager at the India phone answering service center. The movie focuses on the cultural differences and clashes between American expectations and ideologies versus Indian ideologies. It was interesting, and probably not too far off reality, to see the main character grow as an individual throughout the movie. You could see him adapt his motivational methods to suit the cultural differences from what he was used to. My personal view is that I think the movie would be a great extra-curricular homework assignment for anyone who wants a good laugh, but relates to our class discussions.

I just saw some clips of this movie on YouTube. It looks like a really good movie, thanks for the suggestion. As American's we feel angry when work is outsourced, however, we must remember that it is not the fault of the Individual on the other line of the phone. They have to adapt to our culture while in their own country, that probably upsets them just as much as outsourcing upsets us. It looks like both sides learn to adapt to the other culture. I hope to be able to watch this movie soon and be able to post more about it.

When it comes to outsourcing I have some strong personal feelings. When I worked at State Street a couple of years back, some of the work I was doing was outsourced to India. Communicating with the workers down in India was troublesome at best and very aggravating most of the time. The cultural and communication differences made it really tough to understand each other and also tough to get the work done that I needed to. Not all the problems with outsourcing had to do with the problems dealing with people in India. My group was dysfunctional and created more problems with the whole situation. I left State Street about 6 months after a lot of my work was sent to India.

Outsourcing is a way companies can try to save some money but the problems it causes upset a lot of the American workers and is reason a lot of those workers will leave that company and go to another company. I actually asked that question on my next interview and was happy when they told me that they were not outsourcing their work.