What role do your personal values have on your offshoring decisions?
I just wrote a comment on Computable, a famous Dutch IT newspaper; the article discusses a research from Ordina about the under estimation of the human side in outsourcing. Speaking about the human side of outsourcing puts two central subjects into my mind:
1. Focusing on people when organizing outsourcing
This brings questions like:
– Who are the people in my offshore team?
– How do I create support for offshoring among my people?
– Does the culture of my company match with the supplier’s culture?
2. The impact of offshoring on your personal values
This subject deals with the human motivations as opposed to sound business logic:
– Did you ever think about your feelings when thinking/acting on outsourcing?
– Do you decide purely on rationality and numbers or is there also a voice inside of you telling you ‘let’s do it’?
– What does offshoring add to your personal values?
I want to discuss the second subject in this article and will discuss the first one in my next article.
To me, business is intriguing; it’s exciting to see what people do to make a living, what ideas they implement to set up a business. But on the other hand it’s often boring to speak about business subjects that are so far away from my basic human needs (eating, sleeping, relaxing). Do I need to make all my decisions based on profit, on sound business logic, on achieving business goals? Isn’t it much more interesting to look at my personal values, to do something which makes me happy, brings me fun, to do something bold and exciting?
One of my personal values is adventure/entrepreneurship (those are synonyms in my personal perception). To me, offshoring is a big adventure. The first time I was having a video conversation with someone from Ukraine through skype, I thought it was so incredible. And still I believe it’s great that we have the possibility to cooperate with someone on the other side of the world. That borders have disappeared and it doesn’t matter if someone works for me from India or is sitting in my Dutch office. And that we are able to make offshoring work, to set up something and profit from it.
Another important value for me is love and openness. This may sound weird in a business environment (my colleagues also looked surprised when I named these in a value-definition meeting we did a few years ago), but it’s important to me. I spend so much time working with people that I like to feel love towards each other and to be completely open with each other. This value is also the basis of my curiosity to work with people from other cultures. The way people in the Netherlands deal with love and openness is completely different from Indian and Eastern European people. Opening up to other cultures gives me insights into my own believes and I learn from that.
And finally, I love to travel and live abroad. Offshoring gives me this opportunity and I travel to other countries regularly. Without Bridge, I would not have had the great experience of living in India.
Of course profit, process and performance are essential to make offshoring work. But I believe that humans sometimes tend to forget about their deep personal values in their business endeavors. I am very curious on how you think about this subject and hope you will share some ideas.
I just wrote a comment on Computable, a famous Dutch IT newspaper; the article discusses a research from Ordina about the under estimation of the human side in outsourcing. Speaking about the human side of outsourcing puts two central subjects into my mind:
I just wrote a comment on Computable, a famous Dutch IT newspaper; the article discusses a research from Ordina about the under estimation of the human side in outsourcing. Speaking about the human side of outsourcing puts two central subjects into my mind:
I just wrote a comment on Computable, a famous Dutch IT newspaper; the article discusses a research from Ordina about the under estimation of the human side in outsourcing. Speaking about the human side of outsourcing puts two central subjects into my mind:
1. Focusing on people when organizing outsourcing
This brings questions like:
– Who are the people in my offshore team?
– How do I create support for offshoring among my people?
– Does the culture of my company match with the supplier’s culture?
2. The impact of offshoring on your personal values
This subject deals with the human motivations as opposed to sound business logic:
– Did you ever think about your feelings when thinking/acting on outsourcing?
– Do you decide purely on rationality and numbers or is there also a voice inside of you telling you ‘let’s do it’?
– What does offshoring add to your personal values?
I want to discuss the second subject in this article and will discuss the first one in my next article.
To me, business is intriguing; it’s exciting to see what people do to make a living, what ideas they implement to set up a business. But on the other hand it’s often boring to speak about business subjects that are so far away from my basic human needs (eating, sleeping, relaxing). Do I need to make all my decisions based on profit, on sound business logic, on achieving business goals? Isn’t it much more interesting to look at my personal values, to do something which makes me happy, brings me fun, to do something bold and exciting?
One of my personal values is adventure/entrepreneurship (those are synonyms in my personal perception). To me, offshoring is a big adventure. The first time I was having a video conversation with someone from Ukraine through skype, I thought it was so incredible. And still I believe it’s great that we have the possibility to cooperate with someone on the other side of the world. That borders have disappeared and it doesn’t matter if someone works for me from India or is sitting in my Dutch office. And that we are able to make offshoring work, to set up something and profit from it.
Another important value for me is love and openness. This may sound weird in a business environment (my colleagues also looked surprised when I named these in a value-definition meeting we did a few years ago), but it’s important to me. I spend so much time working with people that I like to feel love towards each other and to be completely open with each other. This value is also the basis of my curiosity to work with people from other cultures. The way people in the Netherlands deal with love and openness is completely different from Indian and Eastern European people. Opening up to other cultures gives me insights into my own believes and I learn from that.
And finally, I love to travel and live abroad. Offshoring gives me this opportunity and I travel to other countries regularly. Without Bridge, I would not have had the great experience of living in India.
Of course profit, process and performance are essential to make offshoring work. But I believe that humans sometimes tend to forget about their deep personal values in their business endeavors. I am very curious on how you think about this subject and hope you will share some ideas.
1. Focusing on people when organizing outsourcing
This brings questions like:
– Who are the people in my offshore team?
– How do I create support for offshoring among my people?
– Does the culture of my company match with the supplier’s culture?
2. The impact of offshoring on your personal values
This subject deals with the human motivations as opposed to sound business logic:
– Did you ever think about your feelings when thinking/acting on outsourcing?
– Do you decide purely on rationality and numbers or is there also a voice inside of you telling you ‘let’s do it’?
– What does offshoring add to your personal values?
I want to discuss the second subject in this article and will discuss the first one in my next article.
To me, business is intriguing; it’s exciting to see what people do to make a living, what ideas they implement to set up a business. But on the other hand it’s often boring to speak about business subjects that are so far away from my basic human needs (eating, sleeping, relaxing). Do I need to make all my decisions based on profit, on sound business logic, on achieving business goals? Isn’t it much more interesting to look at my personal values, to do something which makes me happy, brings me fun, to do something bold and exciting?
One of my personal values is adventure/entrepreneurship (those are synonyms in my personal perception). To me, offshoring is a big adventure. The first time I was having a video conversation with someone from Ukraine through skype, I thought it was so incredible. And still I believe it’s great that we have the possibility to cooperate with someone on the other side of the world. That borders have disappeared and it doesn’t matter if someone works for me from India or is sitting in my Dutch office. And that we are able to make offshoring work, to set up something and profit from it.
Another important value for me is love and openness. This may sound weird in a business environment (my colleagues also looked surprised when I named these in a value-definition meeting we did a few years ago), but it’s important to me. I spend so much time working with people that I like to feel love towards each other and to be completely open with each other. This value is also the basis of my curiosity to work with people from other cultures. The way people in the Netherlands deal with love and openness is completely different from Indian and Eastern European people. Opening up to other cultures gives me insights into my own believes and I learn from that.
And finally, I love to travel and live abroad. Offshoring gives me this opportunity and I travel to other countries regularly. Without Bridge, I would not have had the great experience of living in India.
Of course profit, process and performance are essential to make offshoring work. But I believe that humans sometimes tend to forget about their deep personal values in their business endeavors. I am very curious on how you think about this subject and hope you will share some ideas.
1. Focusing on people when organizing outsourcing
This brings questions like:
– Who are the people in my offshore team?
– How do I create support for offshoring among my people?
– Does the culture of my company match with the supplier’s culture?
2. The impact of offshoring on your personal values
This subject deals with the human motivations as opposed to sound business logic:
– Did you ever think about your feelings when thinking/acting on outsourcing?
– Do you decide purely on rationality and numbers or is there also a voice inside of you telling you ‘let’s do it’?
– What does offshoring add to your personal values?
I want to discuss the second subject in this article and will discuss the first one in my next article.
To me, business is intriguing; it’s exciting to see what people do to make a living, what ideas they implement to set up a business. But on the other hand it’s often boring to speak about business subjects that are so far away from my basic human needs (eating, sleeping, relaxing). Do I need to make all my decisions based on profit, on sound business logic, on achieving business goals? Isn’t it much more interesting to look at my personal values, to do something which makes me happy, brings me fun, to do something bold and exciting?
One of my personal values is adventure/entrepreneurship (those are synonyms in my personal perception). To me, offshoring is a big adventure. The first time I was having a video conversation with someone from Ukraine through skype, I thought it was so incredible. And still I believe it’s great that we have the possibility to cooperate with someone on the other side of the world. That borders have disappeared and it doesn’t matter if someone works for me from India or is sitting in my Dutch office. And that we are able to make offshoring work, to set up something and profit from it.
Another important value for me is love and openness. This may sound weird in a business environment (my colleagues also looked surprised when I named these in a value-definition meeting we did a few years ago), but it’s important to me. I spend so much time working with people that I like to feel love towards each other and to be completely open with each other. This value is also the basis of my curiosity to work with people from other cultures. The way people in the Netherlands deal with love and openness is completely different from Indian and Eastern European people. Opening up to other cultures gives me insights into my own believes and I learn from that.
And finally, I love to travel and live abroad. Offshoring gives me this opportunity and I travel to other countries regularly. Without Bridge, I would not have had the great experience of living in India.
Of course profit, process and performance are essential to make offshoring work. But I believe that humans sometimes tend to forget about their deep personal values in their business endeavors. I am very curious on how you think about this subject and hope you will share some ideas.
About Hugo Messer
Hugo Messer is a Dutch entrepreneur, distributed agile team specialist, and author. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Global, a software services provider, and ekipa.co., an agile coaching agency. He has been building and managing teams around the world for the past several years. His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make global cooperation work.
View all posts by Hugo Messer →
I think, here you talks about humane side of business, I believe it is not only applicable to offshoring/outsourcing business model but for all business endevours.
Still the concept – ‘Under the sun no profit’ is valid, corporates are trying to do this by moving works/business here and there.
I think, offshoring / outsourcing are purely business driven and customer driven. It is not something happening out of some business leaders’ curiosity, adventerism or generosity.
In business we have two options in front of us to optimise the cost further
1. Process improvement (already done enough!)
2. Outsorce to low coat player (outsource/nearshore or offshore doesn’t matter).
Now, the time is to leverage right cost resources across the world to create expected value out of business. By doing so, ‘PROFIT’ is the ONLY word in their mind – there is no space human face – this statement looks like harsh but business is being done like so only..
In the so called ‘developed’ countries, the trend would have different earlier but that is failing now a days – like Greek crisi, Euro Crisi, UK crisis..
Pls do read my recent blog titled – Protectionism Negative Growth regarding this one, Dr.Zakaria has excellent view on the current outsourcing world
http://saravananthangadurai.blogspot.com/2010/06/protectionism-negative-growth.html
Hi Saravan,
thanks for your view on this. I understand what you are saying, but I am a strong believer of the human side in any endeavour. Eventually, people are only motivated by the influence that anything they do has on their personal life. On a basic level, people work to earn money to survive. And once that’s covered, Maslow states some ‘higher’ levels of satisfaction.
While you are writing that ‘I think, offshoring / outsourcing are purely business driven and customer driven. It is not something happening out of some business leaders’ curiosity, adventerism or generosity’, I must note that in my personal situation my motivation was actually as I wrote in the article. So Might be the only guy on earth thinking along those lines?
Hugo
Hugo,
Great post, well-written!
First, I think it takes a certain amount of something (perhaps personal courage) to blend love and openness into an article about business imperatives. Nicely done!
A variation on this theme is the question “Can you serve two masters?” While there is certainly considerable room for analysis of the interchange between personal and professional values, it is beyond debate that it is a powerful mix when one’s personal values inform their professional outlook.
I suppose there is always an interaction between the personal and professional spheres. And if a person has an “open and loving” personal outlook, the results can be exciting. And if they have a negative personal outlook, the results can be terrible.
With all of that said….
In my experience with global work, which is solely US-to-India, I came to the conclusion long ago that the personal knack I have for living in between cultures has helped improve my effectiveness and the organizational satisfaction in settings where I have worked. A handful of my colleagues would have followed a similar path with similar results.