If you’re in outsourcing then you know about the importance of the contract. The contract is the essential foundation, but it’s not a document that exists in vacuum. Equally essential is the art, attitudes and techniques that go into achieving the best contract possible, and then proactively managing it over its term. That is where […]
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Grabbing for the Holy Grail: Using Vested Outsourcing in the LTL Market
Even a casual visitor to this space knows by now that I’ve been thinking, writing and advocating about using the collaborative, outcomes-based methods of Vested Outsourcing for a long time, an effort that reached a milestone earlier this year with the publication of the book by that name and the start-up of this blog. It’s […]
Failure, Success, Entropy, and Outsourcing
Spend any time surfing the blogosphere and you’re likely to come across Seth Godin, a blogging pioneer and virtual legend in the virtual world of cyberspace. Godin has written 10 books, is an entrepreneur and is described as an “agent of change.” I’d call him one of the Internet’s foremost philosophers of the moment and […]
Buying the Outcome, Not the Transaction
A cornerstone of the commitment to Vested Outsourcing is the idea of buying outcomes rather than transactions. If you are only interested in filling some seats as cheaply as possible or in basing a contract only on the number of touches involved in a certain operation, then the vested approach is probably not for you. […]
No Fun in this Dysfunction
We talk a lot about the need for businesses to change me-first, win-at-all-cost mindsets to that of new vested, cooperative relationships that over the long-term result in mutual benefits. In the world of transportation logistics, supply chains and shipper-carrier relationships it’s a long-running story of irrational and often toxic rate and service level relationships. Carriers […]
Courage, Patience, Trust and Loyalty in Logistics Outsourcing
Although I’m relatively new to blogging, it’s remarkable how much blogging is going on here in cyberspace. There are even blogs about blogs and it seems that everyone, individuals and companies alike, have their own blogs in addition to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. It’s truly a brave new world of networking opportunities and one […]
Darwin Would Be Proud
I hope I’m not overreaching too much to suggest that Darwin might well be proud if, some 200 years after his birth, he were to somehow reappear to examine and dissect the evolution of modern outsourcing from its beginnings in the 1990s to what it is becoming today. That’s because I think of Vested Outsourcing […]
Thomas Friedman: Why Outsourcing is Here is to Stay
If you’ve been following the previous posts in my economics of outsourcing series, I hope you see that thanks to Coase, Solow and their colleagues, outsourcing is now a major part of the business and economic landscape. However, it has been popularized, debated and indeed lionized in the mainstream press by Thomas Friedman. His major […]
Steven D. Levitt: It’s All About Incentives
Next in my mini-series on the seminal economic thinkers who prepared the way for outsourcing I’d like to look at the more current and less theoretical side of the economics of outsourcing and there’s no better place to start than with Freakonomics and the followup mega-bestseller, SuperFreakonomics. Steven D. Levitt and his sidekick and co-writer […]
Robert M. Solow: Brains are Better than Brawn
Most – OK many – of us can remember when there was no Internet, when email was a clunky toy for a few that could never revolutionize communication, when computers were huge, slow and really annoying, when wireless was just another word for radio, when a phone sat on a table, hung on a wall […]
