The Work That Left
Thirty years of outsourcing, and the honest accounting nobody published.
An industry sold a promise it could not price. This book is the reckoning: what was moved, what it actually cost, who captured the gains, and what the receiving economies were left holding. It is written from primary data and from three decades inside the rooms where these decisions were made.
Forty-four chapters across four parts. No vendor testimonials, no anonymous practitioner anecdotes, and no claim that cannot be sourced.
Request an advance copy Read the underlying researchFour parts.
The Promise
How labor arbitrage was sold, to whom, and on what arithmetic. The models that convinced boards, and the assumptions those models buried in their footnotes.
The Machine
The operating reality: transition, attrition, governance theatre, and the slow migration of judgment work that nobody put in the business case.
The Bill
What it actually cost, measured rather than asserted. Including the costs that were never booked because no line existed to book them against.
What Comes Next
Demographics, agentic systems, and the end of the cheaper-somewhere assumption. What boards and ministries should do differently, stated plainly.
Early readers.
The first account of this industry written by someone with nothing left to sell.Placeholder attribution
Uncomfortable reading for anyone who signed one of these deals. Which is most of us.Placeholder attribution
Hatch does the thing the consultancies never did. He shows the working.Placeholder attribution