InShoring, RuralSourcing, and the Heartland

China puts in a call for Red Lake Workers
As many of you local readers know, "it" hails from the beautiful state of Minnesota. Here was a local story that I found to be an ironic twist in the outsourcing trend. The short & sweet:

About two dozen young men from the Red Lake reservation are in China for two to six months, setting up and operating carnival rides in a tour that will take them to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tianjin.

A couple of my regular readers and I have been discussing the notion of"in-shoring". Another called it "rural-sourcing". It should come as no surprise that surprise that the discusser's came from rural areas and feel that the same technology that allows a white-collar job to be moved overseas, can also be used to move it to rural America.

Now I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. Thinking that it would be difficult to compare the number of highly educated engineers in Bangalore vs. Boondocks, USA . Recently however, I was reminded that there doesn't have to be a highly educated engineer living in Boondocks, rather just a highly educated engineer *willing* to live in Boondocks.

I was asked this recently by a high school classmate of mine. I ran into him near the town were we both grew up. He asked me, "Could you do your job from here?" Before I could answer he said, "Wait...why would you want to do!" The speaker is from in Los Angeles, and lives in the fast paced world of commercial radio. Whether *I* would be willing to do this or not, there definitely are people willing to do this, and there is a consulting company that is testing/proving this idea right now -- CrossUSA.

In my last post, I mentioned I was reading the Lexus and the Olive Tree. One of the things that really struck was Friedman's description of DOSCapital. Since this is a 'blog that techies read (thanks to *both* of you), the analogy of a nation to a computer was especially entertaining. He ranked countries from 1.0 to 6.0. Hungary being an example the former and the U.S. the latter.

This weekend I was away from home. While I was sitting by the pool watching my kids swim, I was thinking about one aspect DOSCapital -- bribery both in the public and private sector. As I was deep in thought, my wife asked if I would go get the newspaper. It was a little late in the day and the hotels stand was all sold out. I walked across the street to the gas station to buy one. I grabbed one put it on the counter and counted out my $1.75. There wasn't anyone behind the counter and frequently in situations like this I just leave the money and depart. As I was just about to do so, I noticed the clerk hurrying to the counter to provide "service". I waited and politely asked, "$1.75?". The reply surprised me, "No, that will be $30.75. The rest is my tip".

This is of course a joke in the U.S., but in many countries this is the norm. Ponder this thought then next time you are upset at how long the clerk at 7-11 is making you wait.