Another ailment that bedevils many outsourcing agreements is Driving Blind Disease: the lack of a formal governance process to monitor the performance of the relationship. When we started working with companies more than 20 years ago, most outsourcing arrangements fell into this trap. They would develop arrangements but fail to outline how they would measure […]
12 Ailments
Ailment #9 – Measurement Minutiae
Most of us probably remember being warned by Mom that too much of a good thing can be bad for you (perhaps while you were gobbling up your Halloween candy). The same concept applies to measurement of outsource providers. The hallmark of the “Measurement Minutiae” ailment is trying to measure everything. The sheer volume of […]
Ailment #10 – The Power of Not Doing
The saddest of all ailments is the one we call the Power of Not Doing. We recently observed a case of it at a Fortune 50 company. A senior manager was demonstrating what a great job her company had done on establishing measures. Company executives had signed up for a seminar to learn how to […]
Ailment 11 – New Sheriff in Town Syndrome
You know the scenario. The new sheriff rides into town, wants to clean up and make a name for himself…most often leaving dead bodies in his wake. In the movies the new sheriff is usually the good guy, as in Gary Cooper’s Oscar-winning turn in High Noon, and the bad guys become the dead bodies […]
Beware Strategic Drift—it’s Ailment No. 12
Even the seemingly most well-crafted contracts and business relationships can suffer from a common but dangerous ailment that I call Strategic Drift. Strategic drift occurs when buyers and suppliers don’t work to maintain their relationship, or put in the work needed to keep abreast and update their strategic priorities as business happens. I’ve witnessed Strategic […]
Warehousing Forum, July 2009
“Vested Outsourcing – The Next Generation of Outsourcing” appeared in the July 2009 issue of the Warehousing Forum. The article centers on the 10 ailments of traditional outsourcing agreements.
