To be fair, that really isn’t the point of this blog post The damaging aspects of offshore outsourcing made by Mark Kobayashi Hillary in the U.K. But that was the first impression I got when reading about his first trips to India where a drive through poverty is required to get from airport to hotel.

I just arrived after finishing a similar ride from the airport in Mexico City to the city of Queretaro. There was much less poverty than India I am sure. But the thought of outsourcing software development to Mexico having some relationship to the small and dirty concrete apartment buildings I saw an hour earlier just didn’t make sense for me.

Mark’s real point is as we outsource our work, our culture also comes along for the ride. Indeed I saw too many MacDonalds and Burger Kings in my ride through Mexico. Let’s just hope some of our values of freedom of choice and education will also come through along with our sometimes less-than-healthy eating habits.

My friend Bert (who has an MBA from Stanford, but I don’t hold that against him) says that when you are in business about 20% of the people out there - employees, partners and vendors - will try to screw you. “It’s not a huge problem,” continues Bert, “when you find out who they, then you just never do business with them again.”

Similarly, some managers and workers in these less wealthy countries will undoubtedly grow corrupt from what seem like windfall profits and then arrogantly cheat their employees or us consumers of their services. Then we won’t do business with them and drive home another lesson about free choice in the market place.

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