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What do you do?
By Woody Huizenga | September 3, 2008
Last month, a hyperkinetic speaker named Douglas Rushkoff told a roomful of MPI members at the World Education Congress in Las Vegas that “the problem with outsourcing is that the thing you do is no longer the thing you do.”
Rushkoff illustrated his point by noting that during the tainted dog food crisis earlier this year, the North American companies whose names were on the packages had difficulty figuring out who was ultimately responsible for the dozens of sick and dying dogs. They had outsourced their outsourcing, and it took a painfully long time to track the problem back to a single plant in China.
The problem was that without really noticing it, these companies had got out of the business of producing dog food. And they hadn’t put the necessary effort into developing the management systems to assure the quality of the product delivered under their brands.
Our company’s business model has also evolved over the years, and we no longer think of ourselves as an editorial firm, although most of us did enter the business as writers. But we’ve realized that The Conference Publishers’ core competency is not writing or editing or design or any of the other things we do. The thing that we do here that nobody else does is pull those capabilities and many others into packages tailored to the strategic needs of our clients.
Our core competency is project management. And our focus is publications for meetings and conferences.
The thing that we do very, very well is manage the resources we use. We select, train, and direct the associates we hire. We know that we are accountable for the work they do in our name.
The dog food companies did not demonstrate Rushkoff’s point that “the problem with outsourcing is that the thing you do is no longer the thing you do.” They showed that outsourcing is very dangerous if you stop paying attention to the work people do for you.
And that is something we don’t intend to do.
Topics: Meeting Professionals International, The Conference Publishers |