According to the article “Restoring American Competitiveness” by Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih, the United States industries have worn down competition through the damages from outsourcing manufacturing. There are several issues that have caused serious problems to the U.S. economy, which have caused the decline of trade due to shortage of innovation and competition. Theses problems are lack of funding for research and development by government and businesses and poor financial decisions made by management for outsourcing. There are several recommendations that the government and business executives can do to rebuild U.S. industries.
The U.S. industries have been outsourcing manufacturing for several decades now. U.S. companies thought they were reducing costs by outsourcing development, manufacturing, and process-engineering abilities. Consequently, U.S. corporations’ knowledge, skilled workers, and supply chain, which are the necessities to producing advanced products, have vanished. For example, almost all notebook computers, cell phones, and handheld devices, which were once created in the U.S., are now designed in Asia. When a major U.S. company outsource, it pressures their rivals to do the same thing. They also lose the expertise of process engineering, which would interact with manufacturing on a daily basis. Minor companies and skilled workers go to where the jobs and knowledge networks are no matter where they are geographically in the world. This decline of trade in the U.S. has caused a negative chain reaction to their suppliers of sophisticated materials, tools, production equipment, and components. U.S. industries do not have a way of coming up with new ideas for the next generation of high-tech products...
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...tly governing its scientific and technological company successfully to gain a competitive advantage. These recommendations will help U.S. businesses to rebuild the competitive advantage they once had.
This article revealed how outsourcing manufacturing damaged U.S. industries’ competitiveness and innovative abilities. There were several problems that affected the U.S. economy, like the decline of trade, lack of research and development funding, and poor managerial decisions. Several government and businesses’ recommendations were made to restore U.S. industries’ competitiveness and innovative capabilities. Simply by restoring U.S. innovative abilities will the industrial commons bounce back and there will be economic growth.
Works Cited
Pisano, Gary P., Shih, Willy C. (2009, July-August). Restoring American Competitiveness.
Harvard Business Review, 114-125.
The essay titled America Remain the World’s Beacon of Success by Tim Roemer discusses the positive position America placed as a leader in many of its endeavors in the fields of technology, sciences, and healthcare. In Roemer’s opinion, America regarded upon by other countries as the litmus test comparing their success. Roemer enumerated the many achievements and discoveries America accomplished as new country at only 700 years old. Now the question remains, will the success of America continue to be sustainable? I believe it will be, and I agree with Roemer’s opinion despite the internal issues the country face on a regular basis. After all, success is a daily repeated effort in small sum.
So, there should be an efficient and optimum use of resources with the modernised techniques that provide them competitive advantage over the competitors and make them an efficient organization.
Offshoring American jobs have positive and negative consequences to the American community. Some of those consequences of offshoring American jobs include Amer...
Mankiw and Swagel (2006) argue outsourcing is not as large a phenomenon as the media describes. Their research indicates outsourcing accounts for very little of job loss in the United States, nor has it made a distinct contribution to the slow rebound of the labor market. They go on to propose that increased overseas employment has actually contributed to higher employment in parent United States companies. They reported that while 30,000 jobs were lost per month in 2004, two million job changes per month were happening as well. They reference the Bureau of Labor Statistics when they report that in 2015 there are expected to be 3.4 million jobs outsourced, but 160 million jobs gained here in the United States. They also claim that there is a rise in net US income by 12-14 cents per dollar of outso...
P, Micheal 1998, Competitive advantage: creating and sustaining superior performance: with a new introduction, The Free Press, America.
As the problem of job outsourcing becomes more of an issue in politics, elected officials like the President and Congress will no longer be able to ignore the dilemma. The war in Iraq has been at the forefront of the presidential race but the importance of outsourcing American jobs seems to have been slightly overshadowed. If the issue of outsourcing is not watched carefully and a definitive plan hammered out, a trickling down of negative effects may occur within the U.S. economy. However, there is a polarized opinion on the effects of this “phenomenon”.
Since the concept of outsourcing was introduced it has been a subject of debate between politicians and citizens of the United States. Remarkably, it was the United States who supported outsourcing and now it is the United States that feels its economic progress is being threatened by outsourcing. One may argue that the financial situations that existed two decades earlier are not the same as they are today, thus the change of time, business priorities of economies have also changed.
“5 Facts About Overseas Outsourcing.” Center for American Progress, Center for American Progress, 9 July 2012,
Do you ever wonder what our nations underlying focus is? The answer is simple and should be fairly easy to guess… Money! Outsourcing originated from someone coming up with the idea that we can make products for practically nothing in other countries and make very high profits. Although it seems like a great idea to businesses, it negatively affects our country. American consumers are buying these products that are made in other countries and the companies profits are continuing to rapidly increase. At the same time, people that are in the production field of work in America are losing their jobs because producers would rather pay foreign workers to get the job done for a much lower wage. When it comes down to it, one of the reasons our economy is suffering is because of outsourcing. Basically, it all comes down to money. The consumers don’t pay close enough attention to where the products are made. Therefore, consumers are spending extra money and are causing outsourcing to thrive. The lack of knowledge Americans have on the subject of consumers affecting outsourcing is leading our country to economic stress but if we begin to recognize the issue, the jobs we could potentially save may be our own.
My company is Lockheed Martin. They are in the manufacturing industry of aerospace and defense and were founded in 1995 in the United States of America. As stated on Lockheed Martin’s website, their reason for existing is to, “Help the future arrive. We solve the great problems of our times. We create the innovative technologies that define eras. While no one knows what's going to change the world next, we're probably already working on it.” This company is talented in many categories. For example, they are skillful in aerospace and defense, where they have capabilities is aircraft, directed energy, ground vehicles, missile defense, logistics and sustainment, and the list goes on. Also, they are gifted in areas, such as information technology,
Outsourcing has been around for many years. In this paper I will discuss some of the history of outsourcing, the goods things about outsourcing, and the bad things about outsourcing.
of a firm to attain new forms of competitive advantage (Müller, 2011). It is due to these
...M. E. (2008). Competitive advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance. New York: Simon and Schuster.
We say that we are heading toward a more global economy because of the fact that competition in today’s markets is global. This means that corporations in the United States can compete in foreign markets and vice versa, therefore U.S. corporations and foreign corporations become interdependent and thrive off each other. This can have a good impact on the United States because it allows U.S. corporations to seek materials and labor outside of the U.S. in countries such as China, India, and Mexico, where workers are paid a lot less money than U.S. workers, thus allowing them to sell their products for significantly cheaper than if they were produced in the U.S.; however, the tradeoff is that many American workers in the industrial sector lose jobs due to this shift of labor to overseas. In the long run this will be beneficial for the U.S. and although some percentage of workers are losing work, new jobs in the services sector, in fields such as computer technology, telecommunications, and language skills are opening up and experiencing growth because of this change.
Does Porter’s ‘Diamond’ concept convincingly explain the achievements of major national business systems, or are their weaknesses, theoretically and empirically, in his arguments?