I work for Siemens. Siemens is a Global conglomerate, an 80 billion dollar a year business. We are a very small segment of that, we’re a 100 million dollar, contracting and manufacturing, 100 million dollars a year in sales roughly.

And so when you talk about out sourcing, that’s right up our alley. My career is engineering based. Engineering undergrad, Engineering Masters, and I have had the opportunity to work in several areas in design, in manufacturing, in quality assurance, and marketing and sales and just have been blessed with tremendous opportunities there. In terms of out sourcing recent statistics that I saw about two weeks ago from an economic standpoint show that when the differential between the local salary and the offshore salary is 4x or greater then its beneficial to out source if its below 4x then its more beneficial to keep the job at home and what we are seeing now is a trend where offshore, those individuals are asking for a higher standard of living.

They’ve got the news and the internet and they see how we are living here and so their salaries are beginning to come up closing that 4x gap. I believe that a business, like many other things in life, tend to be cyclical and I think we are going to see that pendulum swing back and we are going to see more of the jobs coming back or staying here in the U.S.

How can you best prepare yourself and I agree with what Gene said through continuous learning and what not, it is tremendously important and if you don’t have a copy of this The Baldridge Criteria or the Tennessee version, the state’s version, Get your hands on this. This is the blue print for an outstanding business and if you understand an outstanding business then you can understand where you can fit in and where you can contribute and innovation is like differentiation you learned in your marketing classes. Sales is all about differentiation and you need to differentiate yourself.