It’s worth your time to read The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. Yes, I know we’re all busy, but you can always get the CD (like I did) and listen to it while commuting. This is the guy who wrote Lexus and the Olive Tree.
What Friedman means by “flat” is “connected globally.” The digital revolution makes it possible to do business instantaneously with anyone on the planet. He talks about many ideas that will really make you think, like China, India, global supply chain, and bottom-up creation of culture, knowledge, and innovation through blogging, podcasts, and open-source software.
Be sure to get the “Updated and Expanded” version that came out a year after the book was first published.
I read the first couple chapters of the book. While he did have many interesting stories to share about outsourcing, the one thing that I was able to conclude that isn’t be oursourced globally out of the U.S. is creativity. A lot of the creative designing and idea farms are still mainly centralized in first-world countries.