I wanted to share some recent wisdom from Jim Womack, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, and a chief maven for the Lean concept. He sends out emails on a regular basis, and one in particular, “Making Everyone Whole” talks about the difficulty that organizations often experience in trying to create lean value […]
Getting to We Follows Getting to Yes
Many of you probably remember the bestselling book Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury, and its influential take on negotiation and cooperation. I’m thinking about this book today in a couple of respects. First, it was published about 20 years ago at about the same time that modern outsourcing began to […]
Cut If You Must, But Do it Credibly
I was reading the Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat and discovered that a mere 10 percent of cost-reduction programs sustain their results after three years, according to research from McKinsey. Sometimes there’s no accounting for cost-accounting when it doesn’t really account for all the costs involved in an enterprise. That can really stress complex supply […]
Collaborate – and Innovate – or Else!
Collaboration and innovation are essential pillars of Vested Outsourcing; they are more than just lip service and group hugs, however. Collaboration requires attitudes, strategies and structures that encourage and reward effective innovation. By the same token innovation requires a high degree of innovative collaboration. Some recent posts from the Horses for Sources blog/website underscore this […]
The Gorilla vs. the Elephant, Part 2: The Elephant
Last time, I talked about those 800-pound gorilla companies that can and do use their market position to browbeat their outsourcing partners to get the lowest-cost contracts and to otherwise achieve their own strategic objectives. It’s a classic case of Vested Outsourcing’s Ailment 1, Penny Wise and Pound Foolish, which might gain some short term […]
The Gorilla vs. the Elephant, Part 1: The Gorilla
A gorilla usually gets what it wants, or thinks it wants because, well, it’s a gorilla; but the process of gorilla-hood means a lot of things in the way get destroyed. Sooner or later if you are in involved in negotiating outsourcing and logistics contracts you’ll probably deal with the big company, the proverbial 800-pound […]
The Problem and Power of Induction
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which has been a huge bestseller for some time, is getting renewed buzz in much of the frenzied analysis surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It also has ramifications in the realm of Vested Outsourcing. Briefly, Taleb describes a Black Swan as an event […]
What Watt Tells Us about Vested Outsourcing
James Watt, the Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer and inventor of the steam engine, has a place secure in history as a prime force behind the Industrial Revolution. Obviously his invention was not the sole factor for the rise of the Industrial Revolution, nor was he alone in translating his game-changing idea to reality. In fact, […]
Wages of Outsourcing
When your major technology component supplier’s employees in China are killing themselves and low pay, job performance stress and quality of life conditions apparently are major contributing factors, labor provisions in current outsourcing contracts suddenly become exposed in a huge, public and dark way. Questions abound, but here’s one: Is pushing for the for the […]
Government Collaboration? Seriously?
I don’t know how closely you follow politics and government in the United Kingdom but something quite remarkable is occurring there, beginning with the recent formation of a coalition government of liberals and conservatives. That’s quite a concept: liberals and conservatives working together. But even more remarkable than that – which normally might easily be […]
