Thinking About Outsourcing?

Cost savings. Labor arbitrage. Give your headaches to someone else. Focus on your core business. Turn CapEx into OpEx. Lots of reasons to outsource. But are these the right ones? Especially in the strange economy we find ourselves in, outsourcing can be a sound long-term strategy. But only if it's done right. In fact, it's widely accepted that about half the outsourcing arrangements end up as failures.

Most of us in the outsourcing business initially looked at Sourcing Advisors with a fair amount of suspicion. Why did we need a middleman to complicate the bidding process and negotiation? Well, after nearly two decades of living with them, and now working for one, we've seen that good, objective Sourcing Advisors help level the playing field, bring the best vendors forward, and most importantly, help clients realize and rationalize a long-term outsourcing strategy that works.

Jay Looney's recent paper is a sound primer on sourcing the right way. He reminds us it's not just about labor and cost, but about people, culture and sound decision making.

Weathering the Weather. You Ready?

It's snowing in Dallas today, and it's beautiful. Winter weather is rare here, so when it happens, it's memorable.

My first "legal" New Year's Eve was in 1978--that night in Dallas we had one of the worst ice storms on record. Accumulated ice snapped trees and power lines across the city, leaving 300,000 citizens without power. So we left the clubs early, changed out of our party wear and hunkered down for a few days.

Fast forward 32 years. Disco's dead and I have more power in my iPhone than NASA did at the time. What happens today if your business takes a 3-day weather hit? Could be an ice storm. Could be a hurricane (Houston, can you read me?).

The facts are, if you're a small- to mid-sized company, you may never fully recover. Depending upon the damage, you may never reopen. Even if you're a large enterprise, the financial and brand impact could be devastating to your customers, your balance sheet, your brand and therefore your shareholders.

So right now, when the weather's nice, make sure you have a plan BEFORE disaster strikes. Know what's going to happen, who's going to do what, and where you're going to recover. Then figure out how to recover from your recovery. Ron Williams at Clearview says, "You're on the Titanic and you hit an iceberg. The lifeboat is your initial recovery. But where do you go from the lifeboat?" We find that many companies don't have Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans. And many who do, don't really know how to recover from the recovery.

So don't save your recovery planning for a rainy day, a windy day or an icy one at that.

The new trend in outsourcing: Your love life.

You might have read my post late last year about a paper, "America First," that questioned if outsourcing is killing your brand. Here's a new way to kill your personal brand and your love life at the same time. Maybe we should call it Poutsourcing.

Outsource love life to virtual assistant?

By Judy McGuire, The Frisky


If you love life needs some help, would you consider outsourcing your search for dates?

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

If you're tired of paging through dating Web sites looking for love, you're not alone
One comedian tried getting a virtual assistant to help her find dates
Company will picks sites, craft your profile, choose dating candidates
The company works with both male and female clients
(The Frisky) -- I am a huge fan of online dating. I met my long-term boyfriend on Nerve.com and the majority of the weddings I've been to over the past few years have been between people who met online.

Though I still have friends who are reluctant to try it (you know who you are!), I encourage every single person looking for love to give it a whirl.

But even I raised an eyebrow last year when I read writer/comedian Carrie Seim's New York Post story on how she entrusted her love life to a virtual assistant in India.

It's one thing to weed out dudes using their blurry photos and attempts at wit; it's quite another to have some stranger pick your dates for you. After suffering through too many disastrous fix-ups, I even stopped letting my friends set me up.

But Carrie had a good experience. Suresh, her VA, found her two amazing guys with very little guidance from her.

"I'm very type-A with all aspects of my life, so it was tough for me to give up the reins," she says. "He himself was a single guy looking for love in Bangalore, so he had a romantic streak. He was absolutely intent on finding me the perfect match. His enthusiasm was contagious -- he even went to the point of penning love letters for me!"

Since her story, I've read several accounts of people outsourcing their love lives. An expert at outsourcing almost every aspect of his life, Tim "Four-Hour Work Week" Ferriss also tried it with excellent results.

The Frisky: How should your family and friends treat your ex?

A brief look through virtual assistant Web sites (there are tons) showed rates ranging anywhere from $4 up to $100 an hour, depending on what was expected and where they were based, with the average hourly rate being around $30.

So I was intrigued when I got a press release for a new(ish) company called Virtual Dating Assistants. When VDA began, they only serviced men, but have recently expanded their parameters to include the ladies. For $480 a month, they guarantee you two dates every 30 days. (They count on spending about 40 hours per month on each client, averaging out to about $12 an hour.)

The Frisky: 8 so-called "chivalrous" moves that creep us out

Please note, I'm no supermodel, but for $20-a-month online subscription I was able to get two dates a week -- more if I had the energy. But then not everyone has as much free time as I do.

VDA not only figures out which sites are the best fit for you, they select candidates, craft your profile, help you pick the best photos, and then correspond with potential dates. I asked Scott Valdez, one of the founders, how catering to women differed from servicing men.

"When a guy is less attractive, if he has a lot of other things going for him, he can still attract a woman," Valdez says. Translation: money can buy even the fugliest dude love -- a lesson I think we all learned from "Millionaire Matchmaker."

The Frisky: What to when you don't get along with your boyfriend's friends

Apparently this is not so true with a less-attractive woman, regardless of how successful she might be. Valdez and Co ran into a problem when one of their less-cute lady clients wanted them to bag her a fox.

"She was picky from a physical standpoint which made it very hard," Valdez tells me. "It didn't matter that she had money or confidence." Ouch.

While she does have good looks going for her, a year after her original outsourcing, Carrie Seim remains pleasantly surprised by her outcome.

"I think when women search for dates online, we can get so carried away with external qualities, like a man's education or job or height or bicep size, that we forget to look for values like integrity and kindness," she says. "Suresh had a knack for sieving out the bad guys and finding treasures."

So hey, you send out your dry-cleaning, why not give your love life a try?

TM & © 2009 TMV, Inc. All Rights Reserved

anti Social Networking: Handwrite a Note

Should you follow up with a handwritten thank you note after a job interview? Susan Wilson Solovic asked basically the same question as she was recently asked that question in an interview. She was not too committed in her answer and said that a cleverly written email had been her deciding factor in hiring her new assistant.

While most emails (no matter how clever) will be forgotten, a handwritten note will be long-remembered. Handwriting and the thoughtfulness it takes to sit down and pen a personal message are becoming ever-more precious and surprising in the text world we live in. Social networking like this blog, linked in and facebook allegedly bring us closer together, but there's still nothing more personal than handwriting. And I don't mean just signing your name on the lame card you sent your mother on Mother's day.

Personal communication, not personalized communication, says you stopped during your day. You took a break from your laptop, emails, voicemails and texts to think of just that person. With pen in hand, you shared something of yourself. Not just your thoughts, but the art that is your penmanship, good or bad. It's the difference between your Italian mother giving you a can of Ragu versus the love she puts into the sauce she makes especially for you.

So take a break, fix some tea, write a note and send it snail mail. This most relaxing thing you do all day just might make the biggest impression.

Don't make a disaster worse

Among other things, my company, Clearview, specializes in Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. And while this is a hot topic in IT circles, we must always remember that a disaster for business is nothing compared to a true disaster like Haiti. And as you've seen on the news the last few days, first there's the actual disaster, then there's the logistics, or lack thereof, which can make the disaster even worse.

Recently, we participated in a "Table Top" with The Red Cross, The Salvation Army, North Texas Food Bank and The Volunteer Center. A Table Top is an exercise where everyone gets together and reacts to a virtual disaster. In our case, it was a tornado and a flood in the Dallas area.

During the Table Top, incidences arise that complicate the disaster. Interestingly enough, some of the most difficult incidences were the result of well-meaning people, companies and organizations trying to help. Church groups delivering mostly perishable food had to be turned away. CEOs wanting a photo op by sending out logo'd volunteers were a major distraction. And people who wanted to volunteer as individuals to help people directly were relegated to loading and unloading boxes. All of these actions, while very well meaning, were a major distraction and disruption to the professionals who knew how to get it done. It was surprising to me how badly these actions of very good people could endanger the mission.

The lesson here is to find out how to work with organizations in your community BEFORE a disaster happens. For example, here in Dallas:

The Volunteer Center screens and educates volunteers--these are the only civilian volunteers who can actually work with people in shelters. The last thing anyone wants in a shelter or a disaster situation is an unscreened volunteer who might be a pedophile or a thief. So, march down to The Volunteer Center, get screened, trained and ready to really help.

The North Texas Food Bank handles all food for those in shelters and in need during a disaster. They are prepared in advance for disaster with food kits that are safe. Unfortunately, your wife's crockpot stew might taste great, but it can't be stored properly and randomly given at a shelter or a feeding area. Cleaning out your pantry and bringing it all in during a disaster over stresses the system and just makes things worse. Donate food during the year or donate your time. Or even better, donate cash monthly with your credit card.

The Red Cross and The Salvation Army are the real pros. Stay out of their way. They know what they're doing, and I thank God for them. Donate to them regularly. Monetary donation to all these agencies when times are good is the best way to ensure they have the resources, funding, infrastructure and people to get the job done when a disaster really strikes.

PowerPoint Culture

How many times in your organization does a simple question get answered by a PowerPoint deck? How many times have you seen your sales guys spend an hour talking at a PowerPoint instead of letting the prospect discuss her issues? Has PowerPoint sent your culture to the background?

Not too long ago, I worked on a gig with one of the largest consulting/IT firms in the world and was forced to buy an external hardrive just to house the number of PowerPoint decks I received everytime I asked a relatively easy question. This company really didn't talk much anymore. They certainly didn't answer questions directly. Innovation was a real stretch. What they did all day long, every day, was to have teleconferences to go over powerpoints. You'd think as a consulting firm, they might take a look at themselves and wonder if this was really productive.

I also think PowerPoints really killed EDS. When slides cost $300 each with a rush charge, sales folks used their words and ideas judiciously and carefully--and only for the client or prospect. You would have been shot if you spent that kind of money on an internal audience. So no one did. We were spared the many wasted hours listening to a talking head read PowerPoints that had become teleprompters.

About the time PowerPoint was on everyone's desktop, I noticed a kind of PowerPoint narcisism. Egos began to rule and rather than talking to each other, or, for the love of God, actually having a discussion with a prospect. Countless MBAs, executives, engineers and sales folks all began to show each other how smart they were with their ever-complex and impossible-to-read PowerPoints. Man, did it get boring! And, it really didn't sell, innovate, spark creativity, raise the stock price or build the brand. It just gave everyone a tired head.

I'm not saying to eliminate PowerPoints, but I'd like to see if you can go without it for a week. Take the challenge. And while you're not actually doing PowerPoints you might enjoy looking for some of the worst examples you can find.

This seems to be the Worst PowerPoint Slide Ever Given by a CEO according to Google. Don't know about you, but I've seen and, unfortunately, participated in way worse.

Social Media Revolution?

What is your business doing with social media? As I'm still trying to get a good grasp on it all, a friend sent this video.

It does remind me of 1999 when they were calling the internet The New Economy. But of the many flops out there, quite a few things stuck. Eleven years later, Amazon, eBay, Netflix and Google are pretty important to the way we read, work and play.

As an aside, while you are looking at this video, rethink your powerpoints. A discussion for later.

Small Banks Can Do Big Things

I want to start by saying I think "It's a Wonderful Life" is a sappy movie. But there's a George Baily move afloat, and we might be able to make a difference.

The Move Your Money movement taken the netways by storm. Not a bad idea. Tired of bailing out the big banks? Want some respect for your hard-earned money? Put some in a local bank, community bank or credit union who actually might like having you as a customer. This video from ABC news is compelling.

Much like the local food movement, the local money movement just might help local businesses get better loans and better deals on their banking. This isn't just good for those businesses, but it might be good for you big businesses out there who count on consumers and small businesses to buy your products and services.

I worked at EDS for 16 years, and so did thousands of people around the world. And even though EDS is no longer, the EDS Credit Union is still there and it's still a great deal. I'll run into folks I worked with 20 years ago, and they all say the best thing about EDS was, and still is today, the EDS Credit Union. It has helped them buy cars, homes, vacations, send their kids to school and fund their retirement.

So do something to fuel the local economy without spending a dime by moving some of your money. You just might save some money on absurd fees by finding a local banker who wants to know about you and your business.

The nook is here. So what?

True confessions: my degree is in English Lit. So I was more excited than most to finally receive my nook, the Barnes & Noble e-reader that competes with Amazon's Kindle. Right out of the box, with a simple registration, the nook had my library loaded and ready to read. SuperFreakonomics right next to Pride and Prejudice.

A useful tool? Or just another toy? Well, it's both. Right now, you can subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. And since they are stored in a device that's about the size of a paperback book, you might actually read those longer articles you always mean to get to, but rarely do. Think how smart you'll look on your next business trip reading What the Dog Saw. Or even better, let them think that's what you're reading, when you're really flipping through the latest Patricia Cornwall novel and sipping the in-flight Bloody Mary Mix.

The nook handles documents and music as well, because it's really just a giant hard-drive. I'll update you on those works in a few. Like all new technologies, some of the user interfaces feel clunky at first and the e-paper screen is different (but WAY easier on the eyes).

The arctic blast is moving in tonight. Guess I'll go curl up with a good e-reader.

What's old is new. The mainframe is back.

You've probably been hearing a lot lately about things like "Cloud," "Virtualization" and "Z/VM." Guess what? It's because power and space are expensive, and managing hundreds of servers is a headache. Maybe it's time to think about a mainframe and rightsize your data center.

Relationships matter. They always have.

I'm reading "Six Pixels of Separation," a book by Mitch Joel, who happens to be a partner in an interactive agency. The book is about Web 2.0 and the tools we can use to get our companies, brands and selves promoted out there. It's a good basic primer on the things we should be doing today online. You should read it, or at least "snack on it" as Joel recommends you do with interactive content.

Funny, I got the book the old fashioned way. American Express snail-mailed it to a colleague who handed it to me in person to see what I thought. After I received the book, I did go out to Amazon.com to see who was reading it and what they had to say. And, I mistakenly left the book at work, so I downloaded it to my Barnes & Noble e-reader that I have installed on my iPhone, Mac and PC. (Hey, I'm trying to move beyond 1.0.)

The more I read, the more I can confirm that some people, like Mitch, are just great networkers, and some aren't. Yes, there are tons of tools on the web to make your network huge, but it's still much more about you, your insights and your desire to connect than it is about technology. They key is to either be one of those folks or to find those folks in your organization who love to network and love to promote what they're doing and what your company's doing. Give them the opportunity, time, patience, support and, most of all, forgiveness, to go out there online and get excited about their company and what they're doing.

If they don't know how to start, hand them Mitch's book or have them click here.