Differences and how you respond to partners are the keys to making a relationship work
By Marty Pine
“Imagine that your beautifully crafted strategy failed when the divisions within your organization clashed. Logically, it seems that strategy should drive behavior—but, in reality, it’s your culture (underlying norms, values, belief systems) that dictates how people are going to work together. As a result, employee behavior directly impacts your bottom line — your costs, revenue, productivity, customer base, even your brand. Every aspect of your business is affected.”
—Juli Ann Reynolds, CEO, Tom Peters Company & Susan A. Murphy, Ph.D., Chief Consultant
“If You Don’t Have Cultural Alignment, It Doesn’t Matter How Cheap Your Workers Are”
April 26th, 2011NEARSHORE NEXUS: John Parkinson speaks about the top lessons for the outsourcing industry
By Tarun George
On the ground here at Nearshore Nexus, I’m listening to John Parkinson, Chairman and Managing Director of ParkWood Advisors LLC, speak about the Top Nine lessons he’s learned in the outsourcing industry. There aren’t many people more qualified to dish out the advice than this guy – with over 35 years in the IT and consulting sector, he’s been ranked among the world’s top 25 most influential consultants, and has held executive-level positions at Ernst & Young, Capgemini and TransUnion.
According to Parkinson, nothing much has changed in the last couple of decades – there are fundamental issues that buyers continue to misunderstand in today’s sourcing industry. Here’s a breakdown of some of his main points:
Why Cultural Fit Can Make or Break Your Sourcing Operation
March 22nd, 2011
Get a better grip on culture and sourcing at Nearshore Nexus - April 26 – in NYC. Jane Siegel, of Carnegie Mellon, will be among the 20+ expert speakers
Part II: Interview with Jane Siegel of Carnegie Mellon
By Tarun George
Buy-side clients are well versed in evaluating ‘hard issues’ like wage rates, infrastructure costs and investment incentives, but what about the ‘soft issue’ of cultural alignment? In other words, is there a cultural fit between your team at home and your service provider’s team offshore – and does that even matter? Jane Siegel, Director of IT Sqc and Senior Scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, thinks that culture should be one of the hard issues that you consider before outsourcing your project. As she says, many offshore relationships fail because of a failed understanding of cultural differences.
Culture, Conflict and Where Value Fits In
December 1st, 2009
By Danny Ertel, Co-Founder and Joe Bubman, Consultant, Vantage Partners
Complex outsourcing relationships are always difficult to manage, but the unique characteristics of offshore deals complicate the challenge. Some early concerns about offshoring, such as political uncertainty and tax issues, appear to have become more manageable with experience. Others remain, however, with one rising above the rest, according to hundreds of participants in Vantage Partners’ “Managing Offshoring Relationships: Governance in Global Deals” study: culture. And the way customers and service providers manage culture has a direct impact on the value they achieve in their deal.
What do we mean by culture?
Companies nearly always encounter different organizational cultures when entering into strategic relationships with external partners. After all, companies have different strategies, structures, risk positions, capabilities, and norms, and when the deal is more than a simple buy-sell transaction, those …
