Page 15 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

3 PLAY THE TIME ZONE GAME

‘Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’
Fine words, and ones you’ve probably heard not just from Franklin but
from any number of slightly smug older relatives and colleagues.

Yes, it’s good advice, but here’s a modern twist to it. In this day and age,
who says that you are the one who has to get up early?

DEFINING IDEA…
Early morning hath gold in its mouth.
~ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

In the mid-90s the World Wide Web was just finding its feet and sharper
businesses were working out how to use it in order to steal a march on
their competition. One of the earliest stories to surface and raise eyebrows
was the news that some American medical doctors, rather than typing up
their notes themselves, were instead taking digital dictation and sending it
over the Net to India where it was transcribed overnight and emailed back,
all ready, for the start of the next working day. People have long dreamed
of waking up to find their work done for them but, given the general
shortage of shoemaker’s elves in today’s world, that prospect seemed
destined to remain a dream. And then suddenly the ability to export work at
the touch of a button made businesses aware that they could not only
outsource to save money, but to play the time zone game and steal a day in
the process.

Outsourcing has acquired a bit of a bad name in the interim, with
associations of job losses and service levels being sacrificed for the sake of
cost, but while bad news travels fast and loudly the good news tends to be
kept as a trade secret. So it is that knowledge of call centre calamities has
become common currency but you rarely hear about the software
development teams handing over their work every night to their waking
colleagues on the other side of the globe.