Business, Politics, Economics, Leadership

Two outstanding books have contributed significantly to my continuing professional education this last week, to the extent that I want to share them with you, and suggest that you too may benefit from reading them.

The first is titled The Services Shift: Seizing the Ultimate Offshore Opportunity, by Robert E. Kennedy with Ajay Sharma. This book could be retitled ‘Everything you always wanted to know about offshoring but didn’t know who to ask’ because, once you read it, you will have a pretty good understanding of both what is already happening, and perhaps more importantly, what will likely happen next.  If you are a corporate decision maker considering an offshore service solution, or a public policy maker struggling with the issue of balancing the demands for better cost efficiency in government with a public distaste for shipping American jobs offshore, you will gain a great deal of very useful insight from The Services Shift.  If you are involved in the outsourcing industry, whether your employer is based in the US or in an offshore ‘destination’ you can’t afford not to read it. To help you find and buy it, I have put a link to the website for the book in my Blogroll section.

I had the pleasure of being a panelist with Bob Kennedy recently, on an EquaTerra webcast on the subject of Managing Risk in Offshore Services, and this provides a nice link to my second recommendation – The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing, by Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat.  The connection is this – that political risk is a critical dimenison in any consideration of offshoring services, but is perhaps the most difficult aspect of risk to qualify and quantify.  The Fat Tail looks at the wide variety of political risks that impact global businesses, and offers insights for investors in how to manage them (the name comes from a characteristic of a frequency/impact curve that implies that political impacts are both more common than we might intuitively think and have much more sever conequences).  As I read the book, it became obvious to me that any organization making a decision about offshoring services is in fact an ‘investor’ in global business, and the analysis and advice contained in this book is directly applicable to making offshoring decisions and mitigating the risk inherent in offshore solutions. While I have not (yet) had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bremmer or Mr. Keat, I have also provided a link to their book and think that buying (and reading) it would be a strategic investment for anyone in the global Business Process Transformation industry.

The Bottom Line: These two books will significantly increase your knowledge and understanding of offshore services, and will help you make good decsions whether you be a legislator, a policy maker, a strategist, or a business leader.

Copyright © 2009 Mark H. Robinson All Rights Reserved