Excellent piece in The American that illustrates the concept of deflation, using electronics as an example. The two picture tell the story more than adequately and show what US$3000 would get you at 2010 prices, and the equivalent in 1964.

We know that the momentum of high-speed travel makes it hard to change direction, or even to see clearly where you are going. In the same fashion China’s high-growth economic trajectory, and low-cost labor model, may fit the bill for a blind-spot when it comes to the future.

Wishing for a nice neat graph of China’s historical labor costs sometimes works. Or at least it appears to.

Bill Fischer, a professor at IMD in Switzerland, is on top of the narrative change in the Chinese economy.

The US versus China in one single graphic. Use your bull&*^t detector (nose) though because a simple comparison can hide as much as it illustrates.

Manpower’s third quarter 2010 Employer Outlook Survey, is out again. China, as usual, is in the leading pack in terms of hiring sentiment, alongside India and Taiwan. China’s manufacturing base is still on the rise, with pretty consistent growth in sentiment over the past 4 QTRs.

Human resources professionals are generally not strong in technical or economic analysis, even though the impact of these areas on HR outcomes is high.

Up until now salary inflation was the relatively simple matter of HR professionals dealing with the salary demands of other in-house professionals. Chinese professionals have privately and individually fought for, and gained, significant increases in salary over the last 10 years. They have the technical and negotiations skills to do this, and the perfect environment; an economy that has grown 9% per year for 10 years.

According to Prof. Joe Forgas, the best thing you can do to improve your decision making skills, or become more persuasive, is to be a sourpuss.

Waiting is not a strategy. It’s not even an activity or task. It is what you end up with when you are stuck in the middle management layer of a bureaucratic company that thinks that waiting is value-added activity.