One of the biggest bogeymen in the current campaign is outsourcing. During the primary fight, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pounded the drum about the damage done to American workers by outsourcing and outdid each other in promising to stop it through tax policies and renegotiating trade agreements.

A chief executive who recently outsourced his customer call center to the Philippines and his IT help desk to India says the main reason was the much higher efficiency of those service providers - resulting in huge savings for his customers and his shareholders.

Lower wages were not the motivating factor. Anyone who outsources abroad because of lower wages is being short-sighted, he says. Rather, for him, it was the performance of the provider on quality metrics like percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds - much higher than the in-house operation at the company.

When he visited the call center in the Philippines, this manager found that employees invariably had a college education, and were motivated in their work because the service provider offered them a career path based on their performance. By contrast, in the U.S., call centers are seen as a dead-end job and plagued by high turnover that is very costly.

Why don't American companies offer the same efficiency at a call center? Well, this chief executive suggests, tax and regulatory policies in the U.S. can make it difficult for entrepreneurs to start up businesses. Also, it's hard to find people qualified and willing to do this kind of work.

By the way, this American company didn't get any tax breaks for shipping these jobs overseas. The savings were operational, and the decision was a simple business decision - the company's customers and shareholders, and so ultimately its employees, benefited from higher quality at lower cost.

This is the kind of competition that will force American companies and American workers to be better. Read on here.
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