[Vision2020] Made in the World

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>



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January 28, 2012
Made in the World By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

THE Associated Press reported last week that Fidel Castro, the former
president of Cuba, wrote an opinion piece on a Cuban Web site, following a
Republican Party presidential candidates’ debate in Florida, in which he
argued that the “selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of
this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the
greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.”

When Marxists are complaining that your party’s candidates are disconnected
from today’s global realities, it’s generally not a good sign. But they’re
not alone.

There is today an enormous gap between the way many C.E.O.’s in America —
not Wall Street-types, but the people who lead premier companies that make
things and create real jobs — look at the world and how the average
congressmen, senator or president looks at the world. They are literally
looking at two different worlds — and this applies to both parties.

Consider the meeting that this paper reported on from last February between
President Obama and the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October.
The president, understandably, asked Jobs why almost all of the 70 million
iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last
year were made overseas. Obama inquired, couldn’t that work come back home?
“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs replied.

Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies
— and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters
in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a
place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply
chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere.

These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is
now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their
businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed,
marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the
best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more
and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in
America.” Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see
themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the
United States.

Victor Fung, the chairman of Li & Fung, one of Hong Kong’s oldest textile
manufacturers, remarked to me last year that for many years his company
operated on the rule: “You sourced in Asia, and you sold in America and
Europe.” Now, said Fung, the rule is: “ ‘Source everywhere, manufacture
everywhere, sell everywhere.’ The whole notion of an ‘export’ is really
disappearing.”

Mike Splinter, the C.E.O. of Applied Materials, has put it to me this way:
“Outsourcing was 10 years ago, where you’d say, ‘Let’s send some software
generation overseas.’ This is not the outsourcing we’re doing today. This
is just where I am going to get something done. Now you say, ‘Hey, half my
Ph.D.’s in my R-and-D department would rather live in Singapore, Taiwan or
China because their hometown is there and they can go there and still work
for my company.’ This is the next evolution.” He has many more choices.

Added Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc.: “I always remind people that 96
percent of our potential new customers today live outside of America.”
That’s the rest of the world. And if companies like Dell want to sell to
them, he added, it needs to design and manufacture some parts of its
products in their countries.

This is the world we are living in. It is not going away. But America can
thrive in this world, explained Yossi Sheffi, the M.I.T. logistics expert,
if it empowers “as many of our workers as possible to participate” in
different links of these global supply chains — either imagining products,
designing products, marketing products, orchestrating the supply chain for
products, manufacturing high-end products and retailing products. If we get
our share, we’ll do fine.

And here’s the good news: *We have a huge natural advantage to compete in
this kind of world, if we just get our act together*.

In a world where the biggest returns go to those who imagine and design a
product, there is no higher imagination-enabling society than America. In a
world where talent is the most important competitive advantage, there is no
country that historically welcomed talented immigrants more than America.
In a world in which protection for intellectual property and secure capital
markets is highly prized by innovators and investors alike, there is no
country safer than America. In a world in which the returns on innovation
are staggering, our government funding of bioscience, new technology and
clean energy is a great advantage. In a world where logistics will be the
source of a huge number of middle-class jobs, we have FedEx and U.P.S.

If only — if only — we could come together on a national strategy to
enhance and expand all of our natural advantages: more immigration, most
post-secondary education, better infrastructure, more government research,
smart incentives for spurring millions of start-ups — and a long-term plan
to really fix our long-term debt problems — nobody could touch us. We’re *
that* close.

  [image: DCSIMG]


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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