Ever wonder why your collaboration effort has stalled out? Or why your supplier is lacking innovation? I’d hypothesize it might be micromanagement. In fact, micromanagement lurks at the heart of several of the most common ailments that plague or destroy business relationships, including the Outsourcing Paradox, the Activity Trap, Measurement Minutiae, and the Junkyard Dog Factor. Jessica Marie’s article on LinkedIn’s […]
collaboration
BlogTalkRadio — September 2014
Bridging The Relational Divide with Kate Vitasek Jon Hansen’s interview with Kate Vitasek on September 4 Here’s the link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/jon-hansen/2014/09/04/bridging-the-relational-divide-with-kate-vitasek
The Vested Way eBook and the Power of WIIFWe
We’ve re-released The Vested Way eBook this week while making it easy—and free—to download it in various formats so you can read it however and wherever you like. The Vested Way explores how and why the “What’s in it for We” mindset is revolutionizing business relationships through anecdotes and real life success stories. You’ll learn why the Vested mindset is […]
Taking Care with OPM
It sounds like a great situation—playing with other people’s money (OPM). In gambling parlance it’s called playing with house money. However attractive that OPM sounds, it can be very risky business, even when most of the risk is shifted to the person or company with the deep pockets. There are several factors about OPM that […]
Go for the Cooperative Advantage
In previous posts (here and here) I’ve delved into Steven Johnson’s insights on innovation in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. I’m again returning to Johnson’s outstanding book, briefly, because I was struck by an idea—“cooperative advantage”—that he addresses in his chapter on creating online platforms, specifically APIs, or application programming interfaces. […]
How “Mature” is Your Outsourcing Plan?
I’m a fan of “maturity” assessments because they help organizations plot where they are relative to a set of criteria and other organization. While it might be frustrating that there is not “one” maturity model out there, I am ok with that as long as the goal of an organization is to improve by taking […]
100 Years and the Guns of August
This month marks the 100-year anniversary of the start of the World War I – a military, political and human disaster of epic proportions that defined the twentieth century. A recent Wall Street Journalcolumn “The War that Broke a Century,” focused on the leadership (or really the lack of leadership) aspect of WWI. For those […]
Outsource Magazine — July 2014
Some Questions and Answers about Relational Contracting Article by David Frydlinger in Outsource Magazine, published online 15 July 2014. For quite some time now, there has been much talk about the need for a more collaborative approach in outsourcing. In this context, the concept of relational or collaborative contracting often appears… Here’s the link: http://outsourcemagazine.co.uk/some-questions-and-answers-about-relational-contracting/ […]
IACCM’s Contracting Excellence — July 2014
Risk management – let’s share the risk, not dump it! Article by Kate Vitasek in IACCM’s Contracting Excellence Magazine, published 24 July 2014 Risk management by definition is ambiguous and unpredictable, but it doesn’t have to be. Picture a highly collaborative approach. It shares the risk instead of pushing it to the other guy and […]
Parallel Tracks to Innovation
Lately I’ve been thinking about the paths taken and not taken in business and life, the choices made, and how that impacts a company’s success. Last night I was watching Sliding Doors, a 1998 movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah. It is light romantic comedy/fantasy fare, but there’s a cleverly conceived message inside the fluffy story. […]
