Sourcing consultants should aspire to understand every aspect of sourcing. My question is whether that should include ‘crowdsourcing’ as well because this is an upcoming phenomenon. At first glance crowdsourcing seems to be something in the area of Social Media but I think it deserves a more thorough assessment as it can be relevant in […]
Career analyst Dan Pink has been looking at the science of human behavior. Particularly he looked at the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. His conclusion is plain and simple: we are doing something completely wrong! More than forty years of studies provide us with a consistent outcome. There is a wide range of situations […]
Well over a year ago I had several people who talked to me about Best Value Procurement (BVP for short). For different reasons they were all very positive about this approach and its potential benefits. Fragmented stories and various recommendations were a reason for me to go to the source: the Performance Based Studies Research […]
As a huge fan of the TED talks, I quite regularly listen to the diverse range of speakers telling about their expertise and providing new insights. A recent example of a very interesting presentation was from Dan Gilbert who talked about The psychology of your future self. He makes the point, and supports it with […]
Recently I concluded an on-line course ‘On Strategy : What Managers Can Learn from Great Philosophers‘. The course was given by Luc de Brabandere, a professor at Ecole Central Paris and a fellow at the Boston Consultancy Group. During the course De Brabandere focused on change by distinguishing between changes in reality and changes in […]
Career development systems in a consultancy firm have some nasty streaks in it. First I’ll explain how it works and then why I think we should abolish it in this form asap. The career development in many partnership firms is a variation on a children’s game called musical chairs: every level in the organization has […]
Outsourcing has been around for some time now. After the mega deals in the late nineties, the industry developed quite a bit. Deals became smaller, engagement are now mostly multi-vendor, in some cases with a prime vendor responsible for service integration. Over the last couple of years
In a series of experiments at the Department of Psychology of Cornell University published in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger tested a phenomenon now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Their experiments showed that unskilled individuals mistakenly rate their ability much higher than is accurate. At the same time skilled persons can show a lack […]
Richard Susskind is a British author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments and he holds professorships at the University of Oxford, Gresham College and Strathclyde University. Wikipedia lists a lot more credentials but in short: this is a guy with a story to tell about the Legal profession in the […]
Last weekend I completed a course about Sustainable Development on Coursera. The past fourteen weeks professor Jeffrey D. Sachs from the Earth Institute and Columbia University shared his insights in a series of video lectures and suggested reading material. As a special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (and to his predecessor Kofi Annan) professor […]
The company I work for is making headlines in the national newspapers over the past couple of months and not all for the right reasons. A settlement to avoid legal procedures in a case about bribing Middle East government officials, signing off the annual report of companies that proved to have serious financial issues later […]
Lately I have worked on a project where most of the work is done more than 30 floors above ground level. For the Netherlands that is quite exceptional. This country is flat and many cities seem to be reluctant in allowing high rise buildings. This project is therefore a unique opportunity to study an interesting […]
