“This is about trying to get bigger faster, about how we make our next leap in less time with greater assurance of success,” said Seidman of his decision to source critical areas of development of his new platform to MindTree. “It is not about cutting corners. We have over two hundred clients all over the world now. If I can grow this company the way that I want to, I will be able to hire even more people in all our current offices, promote even more people, and give our current employees even more opportunities and more rewarding career paths-because LRN's agenda is going to be broader, more complex and more global... We are in a very competitive space. This [decision to use outsourcing] is all about playing offense, not defense. I am trying to run up the score before it's run up on me.”
Rule #7: Outsourcing isn't just for Benedict Arnolds. It's also for idealists.
One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects.
One of my favorites is Jeremy Hockenstein, a young man who first followed a time-honored path of studying at Harvard and going to work for the McKinsey consulting firm, but then, with a colleague from McKinsey, veered totally off course and decided to start a not-for-profit data-entry firm that does outsourced data entry for American companies in one of the least hospitable business environments in the world, post-Pol Pot Cambodia.
Only in a flat world!
In February 2001, Hockenstein and some colleagues from McKinsey decided to go to Phnom Penh, half on vacation and half on a scouting mission for some social entrepreneurship. They were surprised to find a city salted with Internet cafes and schools for learning English-but with no jobs, or at best limited jobs, for those who graduated.
“We decided we would leverage our connections in North America to try to bridge the gap and create some income-generating opportunities for people,” Hockenstein said. That summer, after another trip funded by themselves, Hockenstein and his colleagues opened Digital Divide Data, with a plan to start a small operation in Phnom Penh that would do data entry-hiring locals to type into computers printed materials that companies in the United States wanted in digitized form, so that it could be stored on databases and retrieved and searched on computers. The material would be scanned in the United States and the files transmitted over the Internet. Their first move was to hire two local Cambodian managers. Hockenstein's partner from McKinsey, Jaeson Rosenfeld, went to New Delhi and knocked on the doors of Indian data-entry companies to see if he could find one -just one-that would take on his two Cambodian managers as trainees. Nine of the Indian companies slammed their doors. The last thing they wanted was even lower-cost competition emerging in Cambodia. But a generous Hindu soul agreed, and Hockenstein got his managers trained. They then hired their first twenty data-entry operators, many of whom were Cambodian war refugees, and bought twenty computers and an Internet line that cost them $100 a month. The project was financed with $25,000 of their own money and a $25,000 grant from a Silicon Valley foundation. They opened for business in July 2001, and their first work assignment was for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's undergraduate daily newspaper.
“The Crimson was digitizing their archives to make them available online, and because we were Harvard grads they threw some business our way,” said Hockenstein. “So our first project was having Cambodians typing news articles from the Harvard Crimson from 1873 to 1899, which reported on Harvard-Yale crew races. Later, actually, when we got to the years 1969 to 1971, when the turmoil in Cambodia was all happening, they were typing [Crimson stories] about their own story... We would convert the old Crimsons, which were on microfilm, to digital images in the United States through a company in Oklahoma that specialized in that sort of thing, and then we would just transfer the digital images to Cambodia by FTP [file transfer protocol]. Now you can go to thecrimson.com and download these stories.” The Cambodian typists did not have to know English, only how to type English characters; they worked in pairs, each typing the same article, and then the computer program compared their work to make sure that there were no errors.