When economists debate the merits of outsourcing, they always invoke the early 19th-century thinker David Ricardo and his theory of comparative advantage of nations.
Businessmen's collective memory doesn't go that far back. When chief executive officers decide to move jobs to India, they draw intellectual sustenance from something more recent.
And that modern classic is a 1990 Harvard Business Review article written by C.K. Prahlad and Gary Hamel. It was titled "The Core Competence of the Corporation."
Outsourcing, when you apply the model of core competence to business processes, is all about companies parceling out activities that they aren't best equipped to undertake.
