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San Jose, CA - The move to outsource white-collar jobs is moving
up the company hierarchy to the incompetent manager level.
Many US
companies are discovering they can find management talent abroad
that is just as clueless as the homegrown variety. India has proven
to be adept at producing managers who are skilled at not adding
any value whatsoever.
 “I thought I was too much of a jerk to ever be replaced,” said
Joe Morphy, an unemployed manager. “I figured they could never
find anybody who combined my total indifference to employees’ well-being
with my astonishingly high level of dishonesty. But they found some
guy in Asia willing to be a bigger asshole than me for one-tenth
of my salary.”
The crappy manager has been a fixture of the American corporate landscape
for many years. Executive MBA programs and a smarmy business culture
produced a class of managers capable of doing great damage even when
under tight time constraints. Analysts have long believed that no
other nation had the expertise and drive to achieve implosions on
the scale of Enron or WorldCom. But, many developing nations think
they can achieve US levels of awfulness if they focus their resources
properly.
Professor Rajiv Mehta of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore
boasts his school is “as out of touch and unrealistic as the
best MBA programs in America.” Many of the faculty cut their
teeth on driving US high tech companies into the ground. “Management
incompetence is a skill like any other,” says Mehta. “It
can be taught and fostered to the point where a high level of expertise
is attained.”
Mehta is especially proud of his Business Miscommunication program. “We
have not reached US levels of windbaggery,” he says, “but
we are steadily improving every year. We are also very close in euphemisms
and obfuscation."
As outsourcing increases, American managers are wondering what they
must do to keep their jobs secure. “It’s not enough to
merely have no understanding of what your company does,” says
career consultant Beth Sharkey. “Even being unable to motivate
your employees is no longer enough. You have to think bigger. You
have to come up with that one big idea that will destroy the firm’s
financial viability. It’s the big idea people who keep their
jobs and get huge bonuses.”
Do not expect outsourcing to end with managers. Consultants may be
the next group to face foreign competition. According to Mehta, “Consultants
having no useful or relevant knowledge makes this an area of great
interest to us.”
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