Is your Innovation Job Safe?

I had an interesting conversation the other day about losing jobs to China. It’s no secret that companies in low cost labor countries are looking to move up-market into things like design, marketing, and sales, in order to improve their margins. This means that the traditional high skilled positions like engineering and marketing will come under direct attack from foreign labor. And, everything else being equal, why wouldn’t the winner be a low cost worker?

Given this view, there is cause for much consternation for the American knowledge worker. But, this outlook is flawed for two reasons. First, it assumes that there is a zero sum pool of work; meaning that if you take work from me there is nothing for me to do. Not true. There is more value-add work in any organization than could ever get done. The trick is that this type of work is not readily evident and therefore you have to ferret it out. Secondly, everything else in the equation is not equal. There will always be geographical advantages to being close to the market which the goods are being sold in. What you have to do is learn and implement a system that raises the switching costs for your company to move that work elsewhere.

The United States has had it very good for a very long time. Technology is becoming the great equalizer that is allowing others to compete on a level playing field with us. So what? Competition has always been brutal. They only real change is where the challenge is coming from.