Michael Spence Quotes

In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.

I see a big, promising future for India's manufacturing and supply chain part of our company.

India is still considered a preferred destination for many multinationals to manufacture cost-competitive high-technology products for domestic consumption as well as for global demand.

Ukrainian business must really embrace global competition. We need to understand that competition for resources and clients is not with competitors from across the street or from another city, but with millions of businesses around the world.

The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers.

With a global society hungry for luxury, distribution and supply chains are now as important for executives as a hands-on feel for products.

Supermarket companies are big logistics companies, and one of the ways we've increased profitability in the past is by re-evaluating how they do logistics.

Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices and staffing.

Businesses are no longer receiving the cost savings from outsourcing that they once did.

When you went into a Boston Chicken and ordered quarter-chicken, white, with mash and corn, when that was rung up, that would signal all the way along the supply chain the need for more potatoes to be put on a truck a thousand miles away.

You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.

Wal-Mart uses technology to increase sales volume, but the more it does so, the more it drives down profit margins - its own and everybody else's. The same logic does not appear to hold for Goldman Sachs.

Will the industry outsource more? I think it depends on the client base.

Today's leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.

It is a well-known fact that bringing in technologies in retail sector is good for consumers.

And it has to do with having no inventory or stockpiles on the shelf, but items arrive as you need to build your product. What that means is that it's much more difficult to actually find stockpiles of already built weapons.

We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.

Our competition for American business is no longer in the next county or the next state, it's around the world.

Why is Caterpillar bad if we create a new job in India or China to receive U.S. exports? It makes no sense to me. We want to drive all the exports we can from the United States. We want to concentrate on all those consumers, outside contractors, customers outside the United States that we possibly can.

Despite all the political sound and fury, little service-sector offshoring has happened to date. But it may eventually amount to a third Industrial Revolution, and industrial revolutions have a way of transforming societies.

We are in a global competitive world. And in the future it will be even more, and more, and more global.

We're part of a global economy whether we like it or not.

Trade ministers lag behind technology or the development of technology.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.