Preface

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to write a book. This desire, like a fat, patient hen, has sat perched on my dream list—a short list of deep aspirations that keep watch over me. This item was in good company. I wanted to earn my doctorate. I did. I wanted to have wonderful children. They are amazing. I didn’t want to hit my children. I didn’t. Not once. I wanted to write a book. Now I have.

Many business books are not really written by the people whose names are on the front cover. That’s not the case here. I worked with many wonderful colleagues during the process of researching this book, and I am indebted to them for their contributions, but I couldn’t check it off my dream list unless I wrote it myself. So I did.

The story of how this book came to be is full of false starts and surprises. It actually starts with a house. I don’t know how it got there, but this beautiful house appeared in my head one day. It was actually more than a house. It was a whole vignette. Picture yourself standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. It’s dark and stormy. Waves are crashing. Thunder and lightning roll over the rumbling ocean. Wagner is playing in the background. You turn around slowly. There you see a house perched on the hill behind you. It’s all lit up, and its warm glow wraps its arms around you and brings you home. It brings you home to write.

So I decided to build the house. My husband-to-be graciously drove with me up and down the coast of New England looking for a piece of property that resembled the one in my head. We found it in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1999. I won’t bore you with the details of planning and building the house, but in December 2001, we moved in. And it was just as I had pictured it. My writing room overlooks Narragansett Bay and Beaver Tail Light.

In addition to a place to write, I needed something to write about. At about the same time we spotted the land, I started a research project with Susan Cantrell on changing business models. You will recall that that time was the heart of dot-com mania, and talking about new business models was all the rage. Our project was not, however, about new business models. We reasoned that businesses would have to change the way they operated much more quickly than ever before as the Internet took hold, yet most of the companies we knew had a terrible track record at change. It didn’t add up to us. How were they going to do it? We set out to find the answer.

We interviewed senior executives, evaluated more than a hundred business models, and accumulated evidence about how companies change their business models faster. For our efforts, we had published several articles and acquired a very solid understanding of business models and how they work. Unfortunately, by January 2001, with the Internet frenzy fizzling, no one seemed to be interested in business models any longer. Despite our surprising and provocative, if preliminary, answer to the question, we closed up the project.

Meanwhile, I had concluded that my organization was missing a critical capability. We did a fabulous job at deep, academic research projects, but we did not do a very good job of supporting our consulting colleagues’ needs for focused, timely studies on current management issues. I decided to demonstrate that a small, dedicated team could produce high- quality, insightful management reports in 10 to 12 weeks instead of 10 to 12 months. Fast-cycle research was born.

Shortly afterward, the managing partner of Accenture’s outsourcing practice, Marty Cole, came to me with a request. He had accepted an opportunity two months hence to give a speech to an august group of CEOs, and he was looking for some interesting new ideas to talk about. The new fast-cycle research capability was just what he needed. He asked if I could do a study on an emerging approach—using outsourcing for transformation. I agreed.

It was mid-May, and we were looking at a mid-July, hard-stop deadline. I pulled together a team of two summer interns, Matt Breitfelder and Mark Arnold, and an experienced research colleague, Al Jacobson of Hartwell Associates. In a mad dash to get our arms around this new idea, we tried to identify every example of transformational outsourcing that existed and to get in touch with executives who had been involved. We searched the Web, interviewed outsourcing experts and Accenture partners, and punctuated our days with white-board debates about what we were hearing and what it really meant. In the end, there were a few long nights, but we hit our deadline, and Marty Cole made a great speech.

Fast-cycle research had begun to prove its value, but there was much more to come. Thousands of copies of the management report were distributed to public- and private-sector executives as Accenture increased its overall commitment to outsourcing. Subsequently, through the hard work of Caroline Trotman, Ellen Marks, Mimi Wallk, Susan Nealon, Carol Lynne Jones, Linda Coppola, Martine Bertin-Peterson, Shari Wenker, and Chris Burrows, I got the opportunity to conduct eight additional fast-cycle research projects on outsourcing. Some of these also had a transformational theme, and others helped us fill in the details of the overall outsourcing landscape. As a result of this continuing rota of rapid- fire research, I personally interviewed hundreds of executives around the world about their experiences with outsourcing.

My research colleagues, Susan Cantrell, Joe Sawyer, Tim Wiley, and Christine Dawson, each made substantial contributions to one or more these projects, and Alice Hartley was an invaluable research associate for several of them. Suneel Gupta, Louis Carvallo, and Scott Crist helped as well. In addition to supporting us with secondary research, Gosia Stergios ran the behind-the-scenes processes to turn our words into works. On the public-sector projects, Tom Healy’s unwavering sponsorship and thoughtful guidance gave us support for stepping out to the leading edge. Marty Cole played an equally valuable role on the private-sector side. Countless others helped by connecting us to their clients and by offering their own insights. Gary Stephen Pusey, Karyn Mottershead, John Rollins, and Alex Christou were especially helpful.

I am also indebted to the busy executives who took the time to tell us their outsourcing stories. Peter Bareau, Steve Owen, and Gill Lambley at NS&I and Marco Trecroce and Su Mills at Thomas Cook deserve medals for all they have done to help.

I owe special thanks to Alex Beal and to Tom Davenport. Alex was the one who suggested that I turn the growing body of research on transformational outsourcing into a book. Tom, as the executive director of the Institute, provided both the financial support and the organizational air cover for me to take the time to pull all the work together.

How did this dream ultimately come true? From February through June 2003, at every opportunity, I worked from my new home in Rhode Island. It was as I had hoped—a quiet, beautiful space with plenty of room for ideas. When the words got stuck, I took advantage of the calming power of the ocean to get them flowing again. It was a house for writing, and I wrote.

My wonderful husband not only put up with me during this time, he willingly served as sounding board and able counselor. He and my children never rolled their eyes when I needed to talk about outsourcing to get my thinking straight. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to have my own personal fan club during this time.

Writing the book also held a particularly juicy surprise. As I said earlier, Sue Cantrell and I closed up the business-models research with a satisfying and provocative answer to the question, How do companies change their business models faster when they are particularly inexpert at implementing deep organizational change? There is a far-reaching answer, but one that demands superior organizational capabilities that are frankly out of reach for most companies. By accident, writing this book turned up a second very good answer to the same question. And this answer is extremely accessible—it’s something that anyone can use. My hope for this book is that executives will find this answer useful and effective in helping them make their organizations great.