ZAKARIA: Can you imagine your interests as a company diverging from those of the American citizen?
In other words, is there a tension here, where you have to try and provide maximum return to your shareholder, which means maybe you outsource to whatever place you need to, versus the interests of the United States? Is there a tension between being a multinational, global corporation and having, you know, an American identity?
PALMISANO: No, I really don't think there is. I mean, again, I look at it and say there's tons that we do every day to contribute to the United States.
Our view of the world is different than the traditional view, which people call outsourcing. We're 100 years old. We've operated in most of these countries, sometimes 90 years.
So, if I'm in a country like Brazil, where we've operated for 90 years, I don't view that I've outsourced because I hired somebody in Brazil.
I mean, we've been in and out of India for 50 years, or China. You know, I mean, so, we've been operating there so long, we don't view it that way. We view it as a great population out there of excellent skills. And why wouldn't we take advantage of those skills?
ZAKARIA: And that makes you a more dynamic company that can ultimately hire more people in the United States.
PALMISANO: If you look at the innovation, if you look at our most innovative products, they're multicultural and multi-gender.
The teams that do the greatest work, from an innovation and breakthrough, tend to come from all over the world. You see it in our laboratories all the time.
So, when you experience this, you realize that is the best way to innovate. You need the diversity. It needs to be multicultural. And quite honestly, the more successful we are, the more we invest.
I mean, the core portion of our research and development happens to be in the United States. Our most advanced manufacturing happens to be in the United States.
So, our ability to generate these profits around the world actually helps the United States -- in fact, more so than many of the other countries.
Zakaria essentially asks him if outsourcing American jobs to Brazil, India, etc is in the interests of Americans as a whole (presuming that the laid-off American worker's interests aren't worth mentioning, of course...), and Palmisano carefully sidesteps the issue by saying 'hey, we've always hired people in other countries...'
Without, of course, mentioning the rhetorically inconvenient reality that the hiring there is at the expense of similarly (actually, usually higher) skilled counterparts in the US. And that, really, the issue is labor cost and profit...not multi-culturalism, corporate tradition, some fanciful notion of innovation or anything else. Cheaper labor floats the profit line and stock price.
And Zakaria lets him off the hook, graciously. This is a guy who's interviewed world leaders, and it's obvious he's ...politely reluctant... to seriously challenge Palmisano on the thousands of US layoffs he's implemented, or the thousands more they have planned under some nonsense about 'diversity' or 'innovation'.
Dressing it up as a rhetorical exercise in cross-cultural innovation is all well and nice and plays well to the current IBM corporate meme. But no one yet has demonstrated to me that American society benefits by sending jobs overseas for the sake of stock price or executive bonus enhancement. Corporate America has been doing this, eagerly and gleefully, for two decades, and we are all now paying the price, and seeing the results of handicapping the American middle class, which by any real measure has been the single strongest global economic engine of the last 60 years. Put it out of work, burden it with high energy prices, drain of it its buying power and it can't support the rest of the world. Period.
I'll scrape up some hope for the future when I hear someone at Palmisano's level publicly address that. Still not holding my breath.
