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 […]
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Take This Job And …
The case of the Jet Blue flight attendant who left his job in spectacular fashion this month after losing it big time in a confrontation with an obnoxious passenger has become the stuff of legend. Steven Slater has become an instant folk hero among his former colleagues and for all those frequent-flyers who must deal […]
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 […]
Making Everyone Whole
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 […]
