It’s the end of August and that means the back to school dance is in full swing. This is special for me because my five-year old is entering kindergarten this year and because my sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher. How quickly we get away from the basics as we progress through academia and compete for [...]
The old saying, “If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all,” could easily apply to outsourcing incentives: If there weren’t any perverse incentives in a contract, there likely wouldn’t be any incentives at all! Incentives play a critical role in in Vested Outsourcing, namely in identifying and achieving the win-win [...]
Watching the Blue Angels do their amazing and death-defying feats in the cloudy skies above Seattle last week, I was awestruck, marveling at the fearless synchronization on display. Which lead me of course to muse about what could happen if that kind of synchronization was the rule rather than the exception in outsourcing. The Blue [...]
I’ve been thinking about the term “negotiation” quite a lot lately and what it means for outsourcing in general and Vested Outsourcing in particular. For instance, I’ve questioned whether negotiation is really the right word to use when talking about creating a vested relationship. In a recent post I advised that parties shouldn’t negotiate, they [...]
It seems there is never a simple negotiation. The term “negotiation” itself connotes that the parties involved have differences of opinions and are sitting across the table from each other discussing positions and trade-offs. Some even view negotiations as a pejorative euphemism – something that should be approached with suspicion or trepidation. A necessary evil [...]
Earlier this year I wrote about courage, patience, trust and loyalty in logistics, based on a shipper’s gutsy decision on transportation rates. Adrian Gonzalez originally brought this up in an ARC Logistics Viewpoints newsletter/blog post in February. He talked about how a Fortune 500 company could have saved a stack of money in transportation costs by [...]
I’m often amused by yearly trend lists. For one thing, there’s so many of them in the outsourcing and supply chain sector. With all those trends trending along and multiplying each year, what happens to the previous year’s trends? Or the trends from the year before? Are they no longer trends? Do they go to [...]
Many of you probably remember the bestselling book Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William L. Ury, and its influential take on negotiation and cooperation. I’m thinking about this book today in a couple of respects. First, it was published about 20 years ago at about the same time that modern outsourcing began to [...]
I was reading the Harvard Business Review’s Daily Stat and discovered that a mere 10 percent of cost-reduction programs sustain their results after three years, according to research from McKinsey. Sometimes there’s no accounting for cost-accounting when it doesn’t really account for all the costs involved in an enterprise. That can really stress complex supply [...]
Collaboration and innovation are essential pillars of Vested Outsourcing; they are more than just lip service and group hugs, however. Collaboration requires attitudes, strategies and structures that encourage and reward effective innovation. By the same token innovation requires a high degree of innovative collaboration. Some recent posts from the Horses for Sources blog/website underscore this [...]
