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 […]
collaboration
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 […]
CIO, Jan 2010
Research reveals that outsourcing customers commit a variety of sins when partnering with an external provider. Stephanie Overby, of CIO Maagazine, walks readers through those mistakes in her article titled “10 Crippling Mistakes IT Departments Make“.
Walking the Walk on Collaboration
If there’s one thing that the economic woes of 2008 and 2009 taught us, it’s that collaboration – that oft-used (and often over-used) word in supply chain and outsourcing circles – must be more than lip service and feel-good fodder for slick annual reports. It’s fair to say that collaboration is an essential key to […]
Vince Lombardi was wrong….
Or was he? It depends on which of the many quotes about winning, losing and life from the legendary Green Bay Packers football coach, who died in 1970, you pick. For instance Lombardi famously said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” I recently had dinner with Mr. Sylvan Schefler, a very wise and seasoned […]
The Five Rules: Laying the Foundation – What’s in it for We?
Any Vested relationship flourishes best in a culture in which participants work together to ensure their mutual success. While many organizations boast that they have solid partnerships in place, the University of Tennessee’s experience and research has found that most organizations really want to enhance and push their own self-interest. This is often known as […]
Rule# 2 Focus on the What, Not the How
Adopting the Vested business model does not change the nature of the work to be performed. At the operational level, lines of code must be written, bathrooms must be cleaned, orders must be fulfilled, repairs must be completed, calls must be answered, and meals must be cooked. What does change is the way that the outsourcing […]
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 […]
