The+India+Inc.+-+Plug-and-Play+Model

How is it that so many business functions were quickly subsumed by Indian companies? Because the Indian companies pioneered how to make business functions “plug-and-play,” to use a term made popular in America. Business leaders don’t have to think about details when they unplug one set of operations and plug in the Indian replacement. Indian companies have learned how to identify American procedures, model them, and duplicate them.

Certainly India has a competitive advantage due to their current pricing. However, that wasn’t their sole competitive advantage. We should be grateful for their companies’ contributions—working side by side with our companies—to set up procedures for American companies to modularize their functions. It’s part of larger trend to identify small business components and apply logistics to optimize them.

American companies shouldn’t be concerned by competition with Indian (or Chinese) companies on price. There are other ways for Americans to produce value. In particular, they can layer their services on top of overseas services. Do you remember—not so long ago—when companies complained that IT companies couldn’t implement things fast enough? With proper management, American companies can produce at least 4 times as much code for the same price as before, subcontracting a lot of the work to India. All the techies that dreamt up “impossible” systems in the past can now specify the systems for low-price contractors to implement at reasonable rates. It would seem that the U.S. technical staff wouldn’t have as much to do in this process. Indeed, they will implement less at the low-level, but they can dream big and produce more at the high level.

Will U.S. technical staff be able to find enough work for themselves? Easily! Every time they create a new project, they can obtain funding if they use the Warren Buffett model. What company wouldn’t accept a proposal that was engineered to make money, buying low and receiving guarantees of positive returns? Americans won’t be unemployed, if they work out—up front—arrangements for positive cash flow.

The Living Widgets Global Supply Network supports this positive cash flow process by setting up the products and the services, and then pre-selling enough of them to ensure that costs are covered.

While on the subject of India, it should be mentioned that their success also stemmed from their ability to find a large, underserved market or market need waiting to be filled. Their biggest break came with the Y2K crisis, when American companies didn’t have the available manpower or budget dollars to cover what was necessary without the aid of India. Thus, another critical function of Living Widgets is to indentify underserved markets, promptly providing solutions where needed.

Complementary models: Open Source / Second Life, Starving Artist, Warren Buffett

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