That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [47]
“There is really no such thing as a low-end job anymore,” said Kannan. “If it were really routine, it would have been automated. Every two or three years the skilled thing you are doing is going to get scrapped. The question is whether you are going to scrap it and own the next job, or let someone else do that.”
Although he is describing a service business, Kannan’s observation points to one of the most important reasons that America needs to keep high-skilled manufacturing at home. So many innovations come from engineers and workers who are actually handling the product, seeing what goes wrong, and anticipating the next breakthrough improvement. “If none of the work is being done in America any longer, that is dangerous,” explained Kannan. “Sometimes my clients say to me, ‘PV, I don’t understand why you are still in the call-center business, a bunch of entry-level jobs. The value we get from you is all these data and analytics. Why don’t you carve that out as a separate business and list it on the stock exchange?’ My answer is that if I don’t do the customer-facing part of the business, I lose touch with reality, and then I am really in the cloud.”
Kannan explained that though many of his workers are in India, his whole technology platform is run out of the United States on servers based in America; some of the data analytics are done in America, and his experts who help clients interpret that data and what it means for their businesses actually sit in the offices with those clients, side by side. “So, in many ways, the best jobs are here in California, but they also demand the most skill,” said Kannan.
Obviously we cannot keep every factory in America. But we need to understand that, particularly for the high end of manufacturing, when a factory moves offshore now it takes with it not just the jobs of today but also, perhaps, the jobs of tomorrow. “If all the manufacturing and then more and more of the engineering moves to India and China,” Kannan warned, “it is only a matter of time before the next Google or Facebook comes out there.”
White-Collar American
At the worst point of the subprime crisis, Tom asked his friend Jeff Lesk, the managing partner of the Washington office of the international law firm Nixon Peabody, how the legal business was being affected by it. “Heavily,” Lesk said. Everyone was laying off lawyers. Out of curiosity, Tom asked him who was laid off first. The answer was surprising. Lesk explained that it was not necessarily last in, first out anymore. Rather, the lawyers who were getting laid off by most big law firms were those who, when work was booming during the credit and real estate bubbles, took the work, did it, and then handed it back when finished. Some of them were now gone. These were people who were doing nonroutine work but doing it in a routine way—uncreative creators. Those keeping their jobs were the ones who were finding new, more efficient ways to do the old work, with new technologies and processes, or were coming up with entirely new work to do in new ways.
This is indicative of the new labor trends in the hyper-connected world. While the jobs of lawyers—and others like them—may in theory fall into the category of nonroutine creators, that does not make them immune from the pressures of globalization and the IT revolution. Sure, at the height of the credit bubble, firms signed up whoever came out of the best law schools and were generous with bonuses. But today globalization, IT, and the tight economy are prompting more and more big companies to put their legal work out to bid whenever they can—treating it as a commodity. So law firms that want to continue to pay high bonuses need to offer something extra to justify high fees.
That is why, in the winter of 2011, Nixon Peabody created a new position: chief innovation officer.
Say what? A chief innovation officer? Why would a law firm need a chief innovation