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 as [...]

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 bestseller, [...]

Next in my mini-series on the seminal economic thinkers who prepared the way for outsourcing  I’d like to look at the more current and less theoretical side of the economics of outsourcing and there’s no better place to start than with Freakonomics and the followup mega-bestseller, SuperFreakonomics.
Steven D. Levitt and his sidekick and co-writer Stephen [...]

Most – OK many – of us can remember when there was no Internet, when email was a clunky toy for a few that could never revolutionize communication, when computers were huge, slow and really annoying, when wireless was just another word for radio, when a phone sat on a table, hung on a wall [...]

Next in my mini-series about the great economic thought leaders who were seminal in the development and success of modern outsourcing is one of my favorites, the mathematician John F. Nash, who took economists a step or two beyond Adam Smith with his ideas on Game Theory and Behavioral Economics.
His conclusions are right in the [...]

Lately I’ve been thinking and writing about the economic theorists and thought leaders who set the stage for modern outsourcing to really take off. For me, the obvious choice to begin this mini-series of posts is with Ronald Coase, who was a pioneer in the area of transaction costs and the nature of the firm.
Coase’s groundbreaking [...]

It’s unfortunate that mistaken perceptions are often perceived as reality; in a diabolical way the mistake then becomes reality.
When people ask what I do and I explain that I teach people how to do their outsourcing better and smarter, invariably they jump into the conversation with their experience about how their company “outsourced”  their work [...]

If it seems like I’m a little stuck lately on Oliver Williamson’s Nobel Prize-winning research on Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), and specifically how he has tied outsourcing contracts and supply chain dynamics to his TCE research, it’s because I am.
Stuck may not be the right word actually, it’s more like really impressed and fascinated with [...]

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 survival [...]

I’m always on the lookout for academically rigorous studies that support the concepts of Vested Outsourcing.
Now there’s a new and very important one to add to the Vested Outsourcing backpack: It’s the work of the 2009 Nobel Laureate Oliver E. Williamson. Dr. Williamson, professor emeritus of business, economics and law at the University of California, [...]