I read an excellent post this month from Peter Bregman on the Harvard Business Review blog site, “If You Want to Be Original, Start from a Different Box.” It’s an excellent twist on the old think-outside-the-box refrain. Bregman, CEO of the global management consulting firm Bregman Partners Inc., speaks, writes and consults on leadership. He […]
Is Outsourcing Really a Partnership?
Companies that are new to outsourcing, and even those highly experienced with it, like to say their relationship is a partnership. I suppose it’s good for public consumption and public relations to consider all of the businesses and people a company works with as partners, and maybe in some way they really believe they are […]
Vesting in Back to School
It’s the end of August and that means the back to school dance is in full swing. This is special for me because my five-year old is entering kindergarten this year and because my sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher. How quickly we get away from the basics as we progress through academia and compete for […]
The Imp of the Perverse in Outsourcing
The old saying, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all,” could easily apply to outsourcing incentives: If there weren’t any perverse incentives in a contract, there likely wouldn’t be any incentives at all! Incentives play a critical role in in Vested Outsourcing, namely in identifying and achieving the win-win […]
Flight of Fancy? Synchronicity and Outsourcing
Watching the Blue Angels do their amazing and death-defying feats in the cloudy skies above Seattle last week, I was awestruck, marveling at the fearless synchronization on display. Which lead me of course to muse about what could happen if that kind of synchronization was the rule rather than the exception in outsourcing. The Blue […]
Collaborate for Value
I’ve been thinking about the term “negotiation” quite a lot lately and what it means for outsourcing in general and Vested Outsourcing in particular. For instance, I’ve questioned whether negotiation is really the right word to use when talking about creating a vested relationship. In a recent post I advised that parties shouldn’t negotiate, they […]
Don’t Outsource the Leadership
A key thing to understand about any outsourcing endeavor is that once the decision is made to outsource the work, the work definitely is not done. In fact the real work at each end of the outsourcing equation is just beginning, particularly in a Vested Outsourcing relationship. Establishing a proper, flexible governance framework, setting systems […]
Don’t Negotiate! Collaborate for the Win-Win
It seems there is never a simple negotiation. The term “negotiation” itself connotes that the parties involved have differences of opinions and are sitting across the table from each other discussing positions and trade-offs. Some even view negotiations as a pejorative euphemism – something that should be approached with suspicion or trepidation. A necessary evil […]
Try A Little Transportation Collaboration
Earlier this year I wrote about courage, patience, trust and loyalty in logistics, based on a shipper’s gutsy decision on transportation rates. Adrian Gonzalez originally brought this up in an ARC Logistics Viewpoints newsletter/blog post in February. He talked about how a Fortune 500 company could have saved a stack of money in transportation costs by […]
Vested Outsourcing Trends Up
I’m often amused by yearly trend lists. For one thing, there’s so many of them in the outsourcing and supply chain sector. With all those trends trending along and multiplying each year, what happens to the previous year’s trends? Or the trends from the year before? Are they no longer trends? Do they go to […]
