project management and legal/ethical issues

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A project I did once for Black & Decker can be summerized like this:

The scope was to go to China, find an excellent supplier of a range of low cost door locks, develop new packaging, make sure they pass Grade 3 Security Rating, negotiate a long-term supplier contract with the Chinese supplier, set up all logistics paths to warehouse in South Carolina, and make sure they got on the store shelves of Walmart within 4 and 1/2 months (and more).

The problems facing me: this project would require that I ship the the entire product line within 3 months of start. A Black & Decker US project of the same scope would take no less than 3 years. Supplier never produced the kind of quantities we needed.

No factory in China ever produced a Grade 3 lock before (despite all packaging on the store shelves that said they did).

As Black & Decker was closing down factories in the US at that time for unrelated ...