found in translation
IT’S JUST A HUNCH, BUT WE’RE GOING TO GUESS THAT YOUR
summer reading list does not include anything by Oliver Williamson.
Williamson, who is professor emeritus of business, economics, and law
at the University of California, Berkeley, is an internationally acclaimed
economist who specializes in the arcane subject of transaction cost
economics. If his name sounds familiar, it might be because he’s on the
advisory board of the Journal of Supply Chain Management, which
published one of his articles last year. Or it might be because he—with
co-recipient Elinor Ostrom—was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize
in economic sciences in October 2009.
What brings Williamson to mind is a note that recently arrived in my
inbox from a couple of good friends, the noted academics (and con-
sultants) Kate Vitasek and Karl Manrodt. (Vitasek
is a faculty member at the University of Tennessee’s
Center for Executive Education, and Manrodt is on
the faculty at Georgia Southern University.) They
were writing to tell me about their efforts to raise
awareness of Williamson’s work within the supply
chain community. His research, they wrote, “has
significant implications for the outsourcing and
supply chain management industries, but few pro-
fessionals outside of academia know of the work
and its sweeping implications, if adapted.”
There’s a simple reason for that. Williamson’s
work covers very complex issues, in a very, well,
complex way. It’s not the kind of reading most of
us are likely to keep on the nightstand or toss in a
bag on our way to the airport or the beach.
In hopes of bringing Williamson’s research to a wider audience,
Vitasek and Manrodt have set out to take his work and make it what it
wasn’t—reader-friendly to a supply chain practitioner. To that end,
they joined forces with Richard Wilding of the U.K.’s Cranfield School
of Management and Tim Cummins, founder and CEO of the
International Association for Contract & Commercial Management
(IACCM), to produce what essentially amounts to a translation of
Williamson’s work.
The result is a white paper titled Unpacking Oliver: Ten Lessons to
Improve Collaborative Outsourcing. Co-published by the University of
Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education, Georgia Southern
University, Cranfield School of Management, and the IACCM, the
white paper outlines principles that supply chain professionals can
apply to get the most from their outsourcing relationships.
What makes Williamson’s work so compelling is its insight into what
makes an outsourcing arrangement succeed, according to Vitasek, who
is herself the author of a book on the subject,
