American MBAs are today’s assembly line workers…

I have thought about writing this post for about a week or two. Either I couldn’t find the words before, or I’ve been working hard on something 🙂 So, I’ll take my best shot and throw some words together to try to get this thought across.

I have been thinking about the trend in America that, in my mind, has been developing for the last 15 years or so. It has definitely been more prevalent in the last 5 years or so. It seems as though the trend of American businessmen/women is that rather than manage local workforce (local to the US), the new trend is to manage global workforce. If you’re running a rather large organization and you don’t acknowledge off-shoring, you might be behind the game. I do realize that there are disadvantages to off-shoring, but that is for other people to bark about in a different post.

It seems to me that the US has become quite a producer of MBAs… you could think of it as universities mass producing MBAs… with 2 year degree programs being similar to assembly lines. That many people looking to expand their skills, takes away from people who work in factories, etc. Thus the gap is filled by off-shoring to “smaller” countries where people are eager to work for their money. Now I realize that the US still produces quite a lot of products, so I’m not ignoring those. I’m just curious where all of these MBA grads think they can fit in.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m not quite sure how I feel about this. If I get charged for gasoline and for the number of miles that I drive, I will not be a happy camper. I already pay taxes for roads. I would gladly pay higher taxes if the people responsible for fixing the roads would use better materials/techniques. As I understand, there are technologies/techniques available today, to allow roads to last much longer. They just don’t use them because then what would they do in the summer? People would be forced to be happy and not have to drive through half finished construction projects, everywhere. On the other hand, there is a downside to only paying the miles that you drive. It discourages buying gas guzzling SUVs and related cars/trucks. The sooner that we can wean off of oil, the better, in my opinion.