Selecting a service provider should be more like a business merger or acquisition or even someone seeking a lifelong soul mate, instead of the arms-length, hard-nosed, knock-down drag-out situations we too often see (or are called in to change).
I once addressed a group of senior-level business processing outsourcing professionals and industry experts in Bangalore, India, in a conference hosted by my LimeBridge Global Alliance partner there, M.D. Ramaswami (who had set up and run Dell's first "captive" center in India several years earlier). One of my two presentations was "Building Lasting Partnerships—an Outside-In Perspective." I shared a Google search I'd done in 2003 on "lasting partnerships" and "building lasting partnerships," where I got an astounding 431,000 and 210,000 hits, respectively. I entered the same terms recently, and it's clear that things have gotten only more interesting: 702,000 hits for "lasting partnerships" and 569,000 for "building lasting...