Environment is key

As I am approaching the end of my engagement with American Express, I am almost getting a bit misty-eyed at the thought of leaving behind a very fine team of people. It's good to work with a bunch of bright professionals who have a welcoming, forward-thinking and go-get-it attitude. Not only does it make you feel warm and fuzzy, but it is also inspirational in answering the questions you are bound to ask yourself at times, such as "what do I want to be?" and "who would I like to work with?".

In the end, at work as in life, what surrounds you is such a massive contributor to success: inspiring and collaborative people, space, daylight, and of course, good coffee!

Gut feelings (cont.)

I have just discovered that LSE provides recordings of its public lectures, and that includes the one on Gut Feeling mentioned in my last post. Hurray! Enjoy.
http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20081020_1830_gutFeelingsShortCutsToBetterDecisionMaking.mp3

How to listen to your gut

I attended a very interesting (and rather entertaining) public lecture at the London School of Economics earlier this week. This in itself is an experience I recommend, be it for the strange feeling it gives you to sit into a university auditorium in the presence of students again.

The lecture was given by eminent psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer of the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. It was entitled "Gut Feelings: short cuts to better decision making", and Dr Gigerenzer made, with a certain sense of humour, the point that in many circumstances decisions are better made by relying on the gut feeling of experts rather than the lengthy (and costly) pros-and-cons analysis that can sometimes come in the way of success.

Another interesting point was that gut feeling was not recognised there to be the "unconscious" version of a quicker pros-and-cons calculation than we usually make consciously with spreadsheets and comparative analysis, but definitely a completely different process calling in to other capabilities in the brain. Our presenter talked about "fast and simple heuristics" (defined there as decision strategies that ignore information, instead of trying to incorporate as much information as possible into the decision making process).

If you weren't lucky enough to attend the lecture, then you could also read the book (same title as the lecture, above). And in the same spirit, what was discussed reminded me very much of another book that made a similar case for gut feelings: "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", by Malcolm Gladwell.

I found myself wondering how many times I had relied on such strategies into my daily life, and how much of this could apply to business as well.

Certainly, I concluded that the best decisions, those that resulted in fruitful, rich experiences and learnings, had been made on my part not only by following gut feelings, but also by ignoring rational logic (often impersonated by caring friends asking me with a worried look: "why?" or "are you sure you want to do this?").

I think this was also the case in successful things that I achieved at work - in hiring talented staff that ended up bringing something unconventional and beneficial to a team, for example. I am also, by the way, always a bit doubtful regarding the benefits of countless interviews and, worse, psychometric testing.

All in all, I reckon that it pays to trust yourself and be bold.

The O word

I thought I would kick-off this blog with some thoughts about the O word -- outsourcing. I was spending some time today reading the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) Body of Knowledge, and got reminded of one of the most significant challenges that operations leaders have to overcome when outsourcing is going on: human reluctance.

It's tough to describe exactly how much people get emotionally affected by the decision to outsource (before, during and after implementation), and in such circumstances there are always a number of arguments against the decision.

The IAOP summarises them into 4 key common (mis)conceptions:

• outsourcing = job losses
• outsourcing implies a step back for the retained employees
• companies outsource to get rid of their problems, when they would be better off facing them
• the economy suffers when outsourcing is used

Without entering the debate too much, I will still say that in my mind outsourcing is a tremendous source of opportunities for people and organisations. I could easily find you at least one counterargument for each of the points above, but then again you might tell me that it's because I've been lucky enough to be in a situation where outsourcing represented an opportunity for me, and also because I'm a member of the IAOP myself.

Regardless, I think outsourcing is here to stay, what with the gigantic businesses that thrive on it (it is, in itself, a bit of an industry) and the countless benefits it brings to companies that use it.

And with that in mind, I believe that what operations leaders should attempt to do is, quite simply, making it work. Sometimes a decision isn't a good one until you make it so. Actually, most of the time. (Always?). Are there bad decisions, or just poorly implemented ones?

All in all, the challenge we face as leaders of outsourced operations at all levels is first and foremost to engage the retained team (and sometimes not just our teams, but also the surrounding teams, and not least the internal stakeholders who think their world may collapse when the work gets done elsewhere).

So the question is: how do you engage your team in championing their new working world and making it go round? How do you show your clients that it will work (despite the probable hick-ups of the early days/weeks/months)?

It takes more than a few weeks to get an outsourcing initiative working and showing you its worth -- some say more than a whole year. That's a long time, considering that within that timescale your own team, even if their intention is to "get used to it eventually" have plenty of opportunities to see "proof" that the whole thing is just doomed to failure, and therefore lose all interest in even trying to make it work.

I'd like to invite my more experienced colleagues to provide their insights here, and tell us how they experienced outsourcing in their working life as operations leaders: what key issues they faced as far as people were concerned, and most importantly how they tackled them and resolved them...

Oh, and if any of you would like to learn more about outsourcing, I warmly recommend Phil Fersht's highly entertaining and knowledgeable Horses for Sources blog.