One Size Fits All: “Vested” for Large and Small Companies Article published on January 28, 2014 by Kate Vitasek and Scott R. Schroeder (Owner/CEO, RelianceCM) Companies of all sizes are finding that negotiating and nurturing relationships with suppliers can provide a sustainable competitive advantage. Learn how the “Vested” model is lifting one small, Oregon-based contract manufacturer’s […]
win-win
Area Development — December 2013
Vested Outsourcing: How P&G Brought its Focus on Innovation to Facilities Management Article in Area Development online on Dec. 10, 2013 by Kate Vitasek and Joseph Tillman. In a unique arrangement, P&G outsourced its facilities management, along with several other functions, creating a collaborative, win-win relationship with its service providers… Here’s the link for the […]
GENCO Joins the Ranks of Vested Award-Winning Companies
If necessity is the mother of invention, transformation may well be the big daddy of re-invention. That’s perhaps what Dell and GENCO thought as they held a Global Outlet Partnership Summit in Fort Worth, TX in 2011. The purpose of the summit was to restructure and align their outsourcing agreement to move from a traditional […]
Outsource Magazine — October 2013
Stewart and Plotkin, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Generous Strategies Column by Kate Vitasek published Oct. 16 in Outsource Magazine online. I’ve been a game theory fan for many years, particularly as it relates to showing that cooperative behavior indeed creates true “win-win” situations. So I was excited to read a work of University of Pennsylvania […]
Outsource Magazine — September 2013
Dyer and Singh: The relational view for alliances and alignment Column/blog by Kate Vitasek published on September 6. This month Academics of Outsourcing highlight goes to professors Jeffrey H. Dyer and Harbir Singh for their influential work on the topic on what they call the “relational view,” of working in highly strategic alliances… Here’s the […]
Gaming with Game Theory
What happens when a behavioral ecologist uses a game theory exam to test his students’ proficiency at cheating? Even better, what happens when the same UCLA professor, Peter Nonacs, then confronts his students with a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to decide their final grades? Both Nonacs and the students learned important lessons about Game […]
Dell’s Journey to Vested Innovation
Dell is much in the news lately, and for good reason, what with founder Michael S. Dell’s controversial plan to buy out the company and take it private for $24.4 billion coupled with mounting opposition to his plan from no less an eminence than the financier Carl Icahn and other major shareholders. I’m not here […]
Vested and Value Creation
There’s a short quote about creating value—along with a cute cartoon—that’s gone viral on the internet. It goes like this this: “I met a man with a dollar. We exchanged dollars. We each still had one dollar. Then I met a man with an idea. We exchanged ideas. Now we each have two ideas.” The […]
Coase: Are Economists Becoming Irrelevant?
Followers of this blog and the “economics of outsourcing” series know how much I admire Ronald Coase and the contributions he has made to economic thought regarding transaction costs, total costs, getting the math right and the emergence of modern outsource contracting. His groundbreaking work, stretching back to the 1930s, shed light on a new […]
Stephen Covey and Principled Leadership
As the year winds down I want to pay tribute to someone, who whether you realize it or not probably had a major influence on your life at some point both in personal and professional terms. Stephen Covey—the educator, speaker and businessman, and the author in 1989 of the seminal The Seven Habits of Highly […]
