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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

A popular outsourcing rationalization has it that companies should “keep the core and outsource the rest.”

I call it rationalization rather than rationale because:

  • It solves nothing: Outsource something you don’t know how to manage and you still don’t know how to manage it, only now, you’re badly managing a company that wants as much of your money as it can get.
  • It suffers from recursion failure.

KJR has already covered the first two points—click on the links or buy yourself a copy of Outsourcing Debunked (Bob Lewis, 2011). But what’s recursion failure? Glad you asked.

Outsourcing is like anything else in business—to succeed, you have to be good at it.

But as anything that isn’t core must be outsourced, and as the notion that managing outsourcers might be a core competency is absurd, the only logical conclusion is that companies that outsource must outsource outsourcing management to an outsourcing management outsourcer.

To succeed at that, the company must be good at outsourcing outsourcing management. And so on, ad infinitum—recursion at its finest.

Okay, I wouldn’t want to try that logic on a business executive weighing the pros and cons of outsourcing, but it was fun, wasn’t it?

What isn’t fun: Why an increasing number of American business managers are receptive to the even-more absurd arguments in favor of IT outsourcing, both the traditional kind and its current commodity end-point, cloud computing.

Look, even those unenlightened IT shops that thought they had internal customers usually involved themselves in the business processes and practices they were helping improve through automation to some extent. Few business analysts strictly limited their conversations to “what do you want the software to do?”

IT outsourcers, in contrast, deliver software that fulfills requirements and meets specifications. If they do that, all is good with the world, whether or not the software does anything useful.

Deep down inside, every business executive who ever endorsed an IT outsource understood this difference, and yet it didn’t matter. They considered overseeing IT to be an aggravation, and so they willingly “kept the core and outsourced the rest.”

Now we have the cloud, and software as a service (SaaS). The “new” question is, “Why should we spend lots of time with IT on a CRM implementation when we can call Salesforce and be up and running the next day?”

What’s sad is that they know the answer to this seemingly rhetorical question: If they do this they’ll be up and running with what we used to call, in more enlightened times, an island of automation.

Multiple islands, really — as many as they have sales representatives configuring Salesforce as they prefer. Add to that a database that’s completely unusable for reporting and analytics, as each sales rep stashes the data they want in whatever data fields appear convenient for that purpose.

Heck, IT could do that in a day, too, if it was amateurish enough to be satisfied with an implementation that banal. It could buy Act! licenses for a fraction of what SalesForce would cost, too, installing the software on individual sales rep laptops with no attempt to integrate them.

Nothing to it.

We in IT have failed in at least three respects, and we’d better fix all three soon, or we won’t be around to say “I told you so.”

The first is that we thought business executives long-ago absorbed the islands-of-automation argument, so we stopped making it. They had absorbed it, but ideas have a half-life, and because we stopped repeating it, this idea long ago lost its potency.

The second is that we argue rather than discuss. Faced with a sales executive who is thinking about Salesforce, too many CIOs say, “You can’t do that. Here’s why …” instead of, “We can do that … in at least three different ways, depending on what you want to accomplish and how much you’re willing to invest to get it.”

Then there’s the third — failing to focus everyone in IT, from the CIO on down to every help desk analyst—on the importance of managing relationships throughout the company. Without this, nobody will give the CIO or anyone else the time to have these discussions, or the patience to listen to the to-them complex engineering issues we need them to engage in.

So of course they outsource, and go to the cloud without involving us.

We’ve given them no reason not to.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Humans are tribal.

Whether it’s an evolved behavioral trait — a hypothesis Edward O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), supports quite strongly — a learned, cultural one, or a combination of the two (most nature/nurture arguments are, after all, false dichotomies) will undoubtedly be the focus on much future research.

The nature/nurture question doesn’t matter to you at all. Where you live as a business leader, what matters is that both you and the humans you work with are tribal, not why they are tribal. The same holds true for you as a parent, part of a community, member of a political party if you are, and voter, which I hope you are: You’re tribal, everyone you know is tribal, everyone you read and read about is tribal too, with almost no exceptions.

It’s the old joke: There are two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.

Except the second kind is as rare as unicorns.

A person is tribal if his/her self-assigned membership in an identifiable group biases their acceptance of ideas, evidence, and the quality of the people they encounter. It’s why, in so many companies, the bean-counters in Accounting distrust any spending proposed by the propeller-heads in IT, who have no patience for the HR bureaucrats. It’s also why they all agree that the company’s pointy-haired bosses exemplify the Peter Principle.

My tribe is better than your tribe. Everything about us is better. And not just better: Everything about my tribe is admirable; everything about yours is despicable.

Tribalists aren’t “they.” The question isn’t whether you’re tribal. It’s what you do to minimize the damage you do to your ability to understand and solve problems by being tribal.

Self-awareness is a good start, of course. It will help you fight the tendency. It’s most useful when you need it the least, though … when you have time to think and reflect. When you’re in a heated argument, and your side is trying to win a political point over the other side, that’s when cooler heads are desperately needed. Exactly when you’re most likely to be a hothead instead.

Fighting a tendency this deep-seated (and very possibly innate) is more admirable than effective. An alternative that’s more likely to keep you on an even keel is to embrace the tendency but to send it in a harmless direction — possibly even a productive one.

Choose your own tribe, and choose it carefully. There’s no reason you have to belong to an already identified combatant tribe, either, and many reasons to avoid doing so.

In political discussions, for example, I find that identifying with the non-existent “Competence Party” invented in this space several years ago helps me avoid falling for the worst of the partisan nonsense fomented by the propagandists who have taken over most of our political dialog.

Join me. Once you’re a member of the Competence Party you’ll have no reason to become enraged at one party because of something horrible ascribed to it by the other. You’ll recognize that you’re just seeing symptoms of incompetence — something our tribe does our best to avoid by limiting our own information-gathering to sources whose first allegiance is to accuracy. And, you’ll immediately recognize attempts to make you angry, recognizing that whoever is trying to enrage you is playing you, no matter which side they’re on.

It works in business situations, too (which is fortunate, because otherwise this would be a pointless KJR). Imagine, for example, that you find yourself in the middle of a dispute between, say, IT and HR management, due to a conflict between IT’s need to recruit a position and HR/Recruiting’s policies and procedures.

Instead of choosing sides or trying to decide which side is right and which side is wrong, join an IT outsourcing firm who just took over responsibility for whatever the work is that IT needs the hoped-for new hire to handle. Ask yourself what that outsourcer would do to fill the position and compare it to the arguments being made by the parties you’re listening to.

Anger makes people stupid. Exploiting tribal tendencies is a great way to make people angry, so joining a non-combatant tribe … even if it’s one you’ve just invented … will help you keep the exploiters from messing with your head.

There’s another, more practical advantage to joining a non-combatant tribe: When an issue is undecided and the votes are close, both of the combatant tribes will need all the help they can get.

You might have to join one, but if you do, you get to choose.

Even better, you can negotiate favorable terms for doing so.

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