April 11, 2005
When Global Gets Really Local Saturday morning, returning home from dropping my daughter at her dance classes, I ran into a neighbor on her way out. We stopped to catch up on how things were going since she, her husband, and two sons moved in last year. We talked about lawn services and the challenge of getting grass to grow on front lawns that either got too much or too little sun. This was the first house the family had owned since moving to the United States from India several years ago. She also mentioned that her older son, who's studying engineering at Brooklyn College, is talking about returning to India when he graduates because there probably will be more jobs there than here. She noted with some distress the irony of the family leaving India for the United States in search of opportunities, only to have the children possibly migrate back as adults. While this sets the stage for a wrenching family decision, it's also indicative of a fundamental change in the global economy. Where once Indian students came here to study, hoping to get a job and stay, today, they're just as, if not more, likely to earn a degree and return home to a growing economy and IT sector. That's assuming that they bother to come here to study in the first place. Along these lines, it was interesting to hear UPS's director of Global eCommerce, Beth Matthews, describing the company's "think globally, act locally" strategy of global growth, say that UPS recruits future managers for its growing China operations from Chinese nationals studying at U.S. colleges. Here, too, is a group that not long ago came to this country to get degrees and maybe jobs that would let them stay but now sees growing opportunity back in China. For UPS, it's a pool from which it can get future talent that already has mastered English and been exposed to a U.S. way of life and doing business. It will be interesting to see over the next few years if the local part of the global equation includes my young Indian neighbor leaving his family to return to the country he left as a child in search of opportunities. Posted by speterso
at April 11, 2005 04:05 PM
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