President Obama said that same-sex marriage should be legal during yesterday’s Good Morning America, after nearly two years of saying that his views on same-sex marriage were “evolving.” This has made Obama the first U.S. president who endorses same-sex marriage, and as same-sex marriage has been one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day, I applaud Obama’s courage and the strong leadership.
Obama’s announcement is significant from a symbolic standpoint. We have moved into more than a new millennium. We are moving into a new age of social realities — a set of realities that will reshape and redefine the very philosophical and pragmatic pillars that have historically served as the foundation for our family and community.
Speaking of new realities, Obama also endorses “insourcing,” which he describes as his latest push for bringing jobs back to America. As a sustainable nation should maximize its domestic workforce, U.S. companies hiring U.S. people to work for them seems fundamentally the right course of action. Companies, however, are here to make money. Making money entails managing costs. Labor, especially, is a huge business expense. So how can we seek profitability while striving to be sustainable?
This week, I had the fortune to hear Doug Feirstein speak at a monthly meeting of Shared Squared.
Feirstein is a co-founder of LiveOps, one of the largest outsourced work-at-home call centers in the world, with more than 20,000 work-at-home agents. LiveOps concentrated on using the Internet to build a business, enabling people across the country to establish their own home-based businesses
- With Doug Feirstein and his wife, who was the first trainer for LiveOps’ agents
Feirstein explained that LiveOps overcame issues such as maintaining agent quality when they couldn’t see the agent by implementing a “result-based routing system.” In this system, better agents get more calls and produce higher sales as a result. To enhance technology, LiveOps later merged with CallCast, a California-based startup company.
I am a strong believer that the marketplace creates needs and that the government should have limited control over it.
Obama’s enforcement of insourcing might only create more problems in U.S. companies. LiveOps produces an unlimited number of business opportunities for people wanting to work from home regardless of their location. On the other hand, LiveOps delivers the scalable workforce to U.S. companies that have benefited from flexible workers. LiveOps touts that a sound business model backed up by innovative technology creates true “insourcing” that benefits both the underutilized U.S. workforce and U.S. companies.
We are moving into a new set of realities, indeed. Do you agree? What do you think of insourcing?
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