Outsourcing – death by boredom?

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I was sitting through a conference the other day and I realized I’ve been listening the same old “how to do outsourcing” presentations for years.  Each presenter just  kept reeling off the same old dull-as-dishwater drivel about “labor arbitrage”, “transformation” and “how to eliminate risk”.  TELL US SOMETHING WE DON’T KNOW!  JEEZ – THIS IS THE SAME FLUFF WE WERE BEING SERVED UP TEN YEARS AGO.

Seriously, if our industry doesn’t pull its head out of the sand and start talking about how businesses can innovate, how they can leverage a globally-sourced environment to be more successful,  how new developments in Cloud computing can turn global business models on their heads, we will kill ourselves with freaking BOREDOM.

Maybe I should read the old man’s patter instead… am sure it’s far more inspiring.

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  1. Well said – have the same opinion with the repetitive nature of these industry presentations. I am sure your famous father has a lot more enlightening things to say!

    Allen

  2. Here here!

    What professionals in all disciplines dont often realise is that innovation comes from looking at other professions and borrowing, copying and hacking their processes. Not disappearing up our own proverbial bottoms and selling the same old tired scripts until we have forgotten why they were useful (and appropriate) in the first place.

    Keep questioning the assumptions!

  3. I agree 100% — but it isn’t just outsourcing and it isn’t just industry that suffers from this malady. As a SCORE adviser I see it every day across America all industries and in government.

    We need a fleet of enterprises that teach “Fleet of Foot” or we will be left behind by those gaining on us or pulling ahead.

    Links:
    http://www.smalltofeds.com

    Kenneth Larson

  4. Phill, it sounds like you are at a point where you could become a leader on this subject. When you can perceive that there’s a problem, you are in a position to solve it by coming up with more creative answers. Most of the people around you, including the ones leading your seminars, haven’t even realized that there IS a problem, so there is no way they can come up with new ideas.

    John Korchok

  5. Phil:

    “A company should never settle for what it has.
    It must continually search for new ways to do business.
    This contrasts sharply with the way companies compete.
    They take established rules as givens and try to become better at that same old game. Unavoidably, this leads to disaster.
    Unbelievable as it may sound today, the day will come when even today’s most successful companies will decline into insignificance unless they change.”

    In 1998 I created a portfolio/book that started with the above text.
    It is natural for humans, organizations and also governments to hold on to what they have.

    I believe the only way that our “system” can change this is to have the right creative leaders.
    Our system of voting and “Democracy” has a handicap to produce visionary creative leaders.

    There are lot of young creative people out there, we just need to create the right environment for them!

    Just my 2 cents…

    JP

  6. @Kenneth: you’re definitely onto something here. I think in this age of rapid information availability, people are being callled out more quickly for being “unoriginal”. New thinking quickly becomes mainstream – it gets increasingly tougher to stay ahead….

    PF

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