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 […]
From the Blog
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 […]
Vested Outsourcing Gets Mainstream Attention
It’s one thing to get attention and kudos from peers and colleagues for Vested Outsourcing, for which I’m deeply grateful. It’s quite another when the mainstream business press picks up on the vested message! But that’s what has happened this week, with props and coverage coming from The Economist and Forbes Magazine. This week started […]
Shared Destiny and Vested Outsourcing
The evidence is building that the Vested Outsourcing message is catching on, if I do say so myself, since my book, Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing, was published in February. More evidence of its growing buzz comes from a white paper written by ARC Advisory Group’s Adrian Gonzalez on behalf of Unipart […]
Trumping Negotiation on Celebrity Apprentice
Often reality TV can teach us something, usually about how not to act or how not to do something. You might be asking yourself, “What can I learn about Vested Outsourcing from the Celebrity Apprentice?” Well the finale has a negotiations showdown between the two finalists for teams “Rocksolid” and “Tenacity.” Rocksolid, led by rock star Bret […]
Vested Wisdom from a Lawyer
After coming down (mostly) on the side of economists over lawyers for negotiating contracts in my post last week, I thought it would be only fair to mention a notable exception on the lawyer side of the ledger, George Kimball, an author and outsourcing attorney. Kimball is a long-time specialist in outsourcing, whose latest book, […]
Lawyer or Economist? Pick Your Poison
It may seem counter-intuitive – or even counter-productive! — to invite an economist to negotiate your next 3PL contract, as recommended by Adrian Gonzales in a Logistics Viewpoints blog entry earlier this month. But would you rather have a lawyer do it? Really? Gonzalez does make a point, and in entertaining style, featuring background music […]
Performance-based Contracts Perform
My Contract Management magazine arrived recently with even more evidence that a vested, collaborative approach to managing difficult contracts – or solving difficult problems – results in success on a huge scale. Most of us grew up hearing about the controversies surrounding the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, a U.S. nuclear weapons production facility that operated […]
