Six Degrees: The Flat World's Mapmaker

Back in the early days of offshore outsourcing -- which is to say, less than 10 years ago -- Atul Vashistha had a problem. "We had these technology products, and we could not do development fast enough because we were having challenges in hiring workers in the U.S. -- engineers, particularly software engineers," recalls Vashistha, who at the time was senior vice president at healthcare giant Cardinal Health.

Around the same time, his travels around the world revealed a unique opportunity. "What had happened in manufacturing 10, 20 years ago -- I started to see the seeds of that in services," he says. "Those two things came together for me in 1998, and I realized that something big was happening. I would never say that I was the first to think about it, of course, but I definitely started to see that this was something that was complex and that companies were going to need help to address it."

A year later, Vashistha founded services globalization advisory firm neoIT. "I'm a big believer that whenever you do something, you have to have a passion for it," he says. And this has meant defending the idea of global free markets against some tough opposition. In 2004, he went up against CNN heavyweight Lou Dobbs -- live.

Still, Vashistha feels that he got his points across. "This country has benefited from free trade, and Lou's stance is anti-free trade. It's wrong. Basically it means going back on the capitalistic principles that we teach around the world," he says. "History has shown us that our success comes from innovation; the United States has been a great economy because we innovate," explains Vashistha, who last year coauthored The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring (McGraw-Hill, 2006).