A journalist from Computable, asked me to give a reaction to this very interesting theorem: ‘Only by moving as much as possible work to low-income countries like India, Dutch ICT-businesses can keep their head above the water.’ Do you agree with this theorem and why? My answer is ‘yes and no’. We offer offshoring services ourselves and I understand the … Continue reading
I have just finished reading the book about Zappos ‘delivering happiness‘. I love the story and ideas in it and I am exploring how it applies to our company. My general view on the business world is that most is about objectivity, about money, about ‘boring stuff’. Many businesses are built around things that are far away from affecting humans … Continue reading
In my previous article I described some lessons learned on failures that I made in building my Global IT Staffing company Bridge. I have few more important lessons that are more on the entrepreneurial side than on the offshore management side but I believe they are helpful in building any international cooperation. The failure I described in my last month’s … Continue reading
A few weeks back I wrote an article about What makes global teamwork, offshoring, nearshoring and remote cooperations so interesting. I have a critical father in law who told me that I described some pitfalls that I walked into and asked me ‘but what did you learn from the mistakes you made?’ So I devote this article to that question, because … Continue reading
One of the mindset differences that often lead to issues in cooperations across cultures is quality versus speed. I believe this is a cultural difference that needs to receive attention in any offshore collaboration. It can result both from a country’s cultural perspective as well as a company culture. To illustrate the point, I will share an example. In one … Continue reading
The past years I have been experimenting a lot with scrum in our offshore and nearshore cooperations. One of the most challenging parts of distributed scrum (the variant of scrum where team members cooperate from different locations) is organizing the sprint planning well. The typical situation in smaller teams (especially for companies that recently started with offshoring, they typically start … Continue reading
In this article, I would like to share (a short version of) my personal story with you. I have done a short interview with myself: What drew me to this market? An odd combination of events. Short after the millennium I was working in a publishing company in Amsterdam. They published city maps, sponsored by advertisers from each city. The … Continue reading
As most of you are likely busy planning and strategizing for 2013, I want to plant an idea. When you think about offshoring, your first idea will likely be ‘ah, low costs’. But is this really the case and is it the most important reason for putting offshoring or nearshoring on your agenda for 2013? Three weeks back I visited … Continue reading
