I'm in new-business development. We OEM infotainment systems to the auto industry. I'm half system architect and half marketing support. I spend a lot of time talking to customers, automakers. I prepare all bids and quotes for new business. We generally work years ahead of time. I'm now in final negotiations on 2009 model-year stuff.

I'm not concerned about offshoring. My father was an international marketing manager, and I grew up with a very international outlook. In high school, when the techie nerds were taking German or Latin, I took Spanish. I believed that'd be a much more important language in the long term, and that certainly turned out to be true.

From my understanding of economic theory, pretty much everyone wins with international trade as long as things are done on a free and open basis. I've seen three or four waves or scares of this style, and the Chicken Littles are always wrong.

I'm no stranger to dislocations. I've been out of work for two extended periods. I worked for seven-and-a-half years as a consultant. That basically meant I was employed part-time. It was very interesting, but not very lucrative.

Before I joined Panasonic, I was part of an Ericsson spinout that went through $150 million in venture money and got its metro-switching systems to market in time for the telecom collapse. Every time I've done one of these dramatic career changes, I've gone from being the new kid on the block to an expert within six months. I've made mistakes. But I ask a lot of questions. That's the way you learn. You don't get education units for that.

One of my pet peeves right now is that Florida has instituted continuing-education requirements. I can get a $19 course online and that's OK, but I could go to MIT and get a master's degree and that wouldn't count, because they haven't paid blood money to the state of Florida.

I have a really big beef with education. It's really gotten watered down. I lay it at the feet of industry. I got a master's and a bachelor's. The emphasis when I was in engineering school was on the fundamentals. We spent all our time on math and physics and waves and semiconductor physics. You really understood how things worked. You understood the limits of models and the limits of simulations.

Back then, engineering school was a lot of hours. To get a bachelor's degree, you had to have 180 credits. Now it's down to about 120. You combine that shrinkage with the fact that schools have to teach VHDL and the latest techniques, and it means they don't have time to teach fundamentals anymore. That's a criminal thing to have done to engineering education.

As the pace of technology began to change rapidly, industry defaulted on its traditional responsibility of training engineers in the real world and decided it would let universities train engineers.

They don't do that in China. They don't do it in India. They don't do it in Germany, or in Poland. That's one of the reasons for outsourcing as well — because industry wants people to be in production right out of school.