I remember when I wanted to sell in France, I had to find a French distributor, make a French version of the product, guess how many would sell there, ship a pile to the distributor, the distributor collects most of the money, and unsold merchandise is scrapped. If I didn't have a distributor, the merchandise was always getting hung up in customs, would disappear in the mail, would take 6 weeks to deliver, I'd get paid in dollary-doos that no bank would exchange, etc.
Rinse, repeat for every country.
Today, I ship all over the world via the internet for $0, have no stock, no scrap, no middlemen, get paid instantly, ship instantly, and the transaction cost is 1% for paypal and 3% for credit cards.
Still have to pay taxes, though :-)
This all true, and empowering for those who have the relevant know-how and opportunities. However, these apparent efficiencies are built on the back of the factors that GP points out. Empowerment for some relies on structures that disempower others. Agency staff live precariously; the companies that use them have ever tighter margins, they are increasingly hollow shells that serve only to generate cash not to provide the security of employment.
The convenience we appear to benefit from is an ever-thinner veneer that disguises deeper problems.
I've seen many guides to doing this in the form of blogs. This is not hard information to come by.
There's also an implication that it's simply okay to let job security rot away, that people in precarious work should simply read a few blogs and retrain. I'm not convinced that it's a good plan to ignore creepingly pervasive employment insecurity.
An interesting outcome is that is becomes more difficult to rise to high levels unless that is what you’re optimizing for early. Ironically, this creates the same pressure that makes high levels so competitive and potentially miserable
I have two theories on this. One is that we simply have improved our management processes. The economy became more developed and you could realize real efficiency gains from outsourcing. From a pure GDP perspective - this was good.
The second is more messy and i'm still working on it but it ties into a lot of macro issues. It used to be much easier start out with no experience, say as a janitor, and work your way up to a higher position in the same company. This was possible because it was all the same company. Now with outsourcing this is impossible, if you start as a janitor, the only thing you can do is maybe run the janitor company, but you won't ever become the CEO of the company whose office you clean. At the same time, you've made entry-level positions at the company harder to attain. The floor is no longer janitor, it is now junior developer (to take a software example). This is one of the reasons why I think there is such a bifurcation in our labor market. A college degree is now the minimum requirement to get your foot into the door. Again, it used to possible to start at the very bottom and work your way up but now there is a hard cap on growth unless you go the college route.
I think this was a clever way for companies to also push costs onto employees. Training used to be a thing companies did but now it's basically been abandoned. Go spend your own money and get a degree before even talking to us is the attitude.