The example you provide has it all: your own moral/ethical considerations as managers both in the abstract and in particular application regarding price, availability, etc; the resistance on the part of some segment of the market to the idea of any US company, and especially one with your purpose, to the idea of outsourcing the work; and a hard-nosed assessment of the cash-flow implications used to integrate all the forgoing.

I think this is something that managers should go through as a regular routine in such instances - not to game the obstacles and spin the PR - but to clearly formulate the moral argument at issue and the ethical implications of the various ways of addressing it.

As it happens, I think free-market capitalism is pretty good at doing this in a highly defensible way - more than that: a way that deserves efforts at emulation even in organizations that may not appear obviously to be market oriented.

But the main issue here is for us as managers to think it through, both as individuals taking individual decisions and actions with consequences, and as the managers of organizations by means of which we do that, on behalf of those organizations, the customers they serve, the people they employ - and even the vendors they contract with.

Thanks, as always, for your thoughtful and thought-provoking observations!

Being profitable is part of being sustainable. Depending on the product or service, so is proper valuation and, if necessary to achieve an acceptable price point, manufacturing something elsewhere.

At one point, OO-RAH.com was developing, casting and molding our own statues. It took hours of work, and we sold them for a loss at $75 each. When we discovered how easy it was to move our manufacturing overseas to a nation that had a comparative advantage, we were able to cut the price to less than half and still be profitable.

At $75, our customers would have to pay more, and most wouldn’t. At $25, they could afford it and were more likely to purchase.

Given the nature of our products, there were some who felt that we should have produced our statues in the U.S. However, had we done that, and had we decided to have someone else do that so that we could focus on our core competencies, it would have been twice what we originally charged, and we wouldn’t have sold but a few — far fewer than we needed to sell — and the initial outlay of capital without quick reimbursement would have sunk us.