I was shocked to discover that other country to have a vacation system drastically different than the American system. Our system is so obvious (to Americans). You get a few days a year off, you take them whenever you want, usually a week here, a few days there, a few more days over there. How could it be any different?

Not in Argentina, at least. Most people there get two weeks off and these are generally taken, together, always during the same month (January to February, which is, weather-wise, their equivalent of August). This is the pattern by custom and by law there.

Lesson: If you are going to work with people in a foreign culture, inquire about their vacation culture. Do people usually take their vacations altogether, at once, or broken into bits? At the same time of the year, or whenever they want? Plan your development and work schedules around these.

One of the funny aspects of working with non-native English speakers abroad is their command of the English language. Most "knowledge workers" abroad tend to be fluent in written English, both reading and writing (or perhaps I'm exceptionally lucky in my team!); but often, they mentally translate words into the near-identical local-language words that have slightly different meetings. Therefore, I solve this problem by paying attention to these problematic words, and always reminding myself to use synonyms.

Here are two fun examples. First, "excited." It's a very common word for any English speaker -- or at least we Americans, who seem to get excited about everything. But in Spanish, "excited" means the same thing it does in English--but with a very strong sexual connotation. I always say "enthusiastic" instead, or, "I'm really excited about this (in the American sense of the word)."

Secondly, "discuss." In Spanish, it means almost the same thing as in English -- but it implies "argue" or "fight" (unlike in English, where it implies only a normal conversation). I make a point of telling everyone, "let's talk about" an issue, rather than, "let's discuss it."

On outsourcing. Agreed entirely with his reasoning. I would add, however, that if you want to stop outsourcing, the best way wouldn't be to ban it, but to make the arguments on why it isn't as efficient as it sounds--and from the inside, I know that there are lots of those arguments! The challenge of outsourcing, successfully, is figuring out how to take those inefficiencies and quench them!

Investigator says U.S. torture was outsourced

Okay, I just thought that the association of outsourcing with torture was funny!

I just discovered, from a friend who works in a prominent position at a prominent bank, that the government of Malaysia outsources the Bank of Malaysia to [this prominent bank].

Interesting: the argument against outsourcing is often, that it move jobs from our country to their country. But an interesting reversal has happened: their governments tend to be so corrupt, that the governments don't trust themselves with money, so they outsource managing the money to us!

The beauty of unintended consequences.

One of the interesting challenges of running a company internationally is International Project Management. We need guys on both sides of the the Panama Canal. How do you best divide responsibility and authority?

It makes sense to me to follow a few principles:

Principle #1: Keep responsibility as close to the person actually doing the work as possible. The practical implication of this, for me, is that as much responsibility should be with the software developers and graphic designers as possible. The challenge is that the work is multifaceted, with client face-time being fundamental as well.

Principle #2: Keep the lines of responsibility clear. Working internationally (cross-language; cross time-zone; cross-culture; unable to read non-verbal signals like body language) is tricky and it has to be clear who is doing what and whom they are reporting to, else confusion and ensue

Principle #3: Actively solicit interactive communication. It is not enough to say, "talk to me if you need help"; pro-activity is important because, human nature tells us, we don't volunteer as quickly as we should.

Principle #4: Context, context, context: Add in additional context for each request, even when not obviously necessary. This can easily become a time-drain (watch out!) but, when communicating with those far away, the reasoning behind requests may not be clear, and everyone understanding the objectives of each little thing makes the implementation much easier.

Other than the obvious (Internet?), two technologies I've started using recently have increased tremendously the efficiency with which I work with the Argentines:

First, there is Lingo, a VoIP service. For $80/month, I can make an unlimited number of calls to Argentina, using my normal telephone. This is a brilliant User Interface: instead of having to install or learn new software or connect a headset and microphone to the computer, I use the UI I know very well, the standard telephone. Furthermore, the all-you-can-eat model is great for this purpose: if I used a cheaper in which I only pay a few cents per minute (say, Skype?), then I will be counting the minutes and minizing the interaction. But now, my incentive structure is so that, on a moment's notice, I call Argentina constantly and work out every issue over the phone. Very quick, very efficient, and reinforces the truth we know but easily forget, the hierarchy of interactive technologies in terms of the efficiency they promote in terms of meetings and dealing with important issues, with face-to-face always on top, phone below that, and then online technologies only when the other two aren't feasible.

The second technology is the Blackberry, which my friends have been referring to as a Crackberry. I'm addicted. The havoc it has caused for my social life aside--yes, that's essential to the analysis of it but we'll do that later--it has helped me solve a critical hurdle in my outsourcing business. One of the key challenges of outsourcing is the increased time everything takes because of the increased communication between all parties. Therefore, with much back-and-forth between the clients, the American team, and the Argentine team, there would be a time lag if, say, I was in meetings all day long and only at night saw the relevant emails to forward or ask a question to someone as a result. This would happen a lot. The Blackberry has solved this entire class of problems. Now, I easily and quickly forward anything that comes in to the appropriate person. It is not a coincidence that everyone on all sides has been happier these last few weeks. Except for my friends.

Outsourcing is delegation--and, generally speaking, people don't like to delegate. David Master goes so far as to say, in Managing the Professional Services Firm:

Like all human beings, professional service firms could be a great deal healthier if they eliminated their bad habits. This chapter focuses on a single bad habit that reduces profitability, adversely affects motivation and morale, reduces a firm's competitive capabilities, and in addition prevents senior professionals from spending more time with clients and investing in the future of the firm.

This bad habit is called systemic underdelegation.

Imagine that a questionnaire was sent to each and every professional in your firm, top-to-bottom, asking the following single question:

What percentage of your professional work time is spent doing thigns that a more junior person could do, if we got organize and trained the junior to handle it with quality?

(Obviously, do not include in this calculation that work which the client insists you perform, since the client must get what he asks for.)

Imagine that each person answered honestly, and the responses were tabulated to calculate the firmwide average.

My research shows that, for the typical professional service firm, the firmwide averge is frequently as high as 40 to 50 percent, and sometimes more. This is equivalent to saying that, of the firm's entire productive capacity, 40 to 50 percent is consumed with a higher priced person performing a lower-value task. Obviously, this is not a wonderful situation. [p. 41-42]

In the US: You just need to pay a trivial amount of money to the government to incorporate.

In Argentina: In addition to the government fees, you need to put 12,000 pesos (about us$4,000) in the bank just for this - in a country where that's something like the average man's annual income!

One of the fundamental problems of outsourcing is, if someone is not by your side, how do you know what they are doing?

There are technological solutions (you can have them check in code regularly and review the code throughly). There are business process solutions (daily email reports, workflow checks on what everyone is doing).

The one that works the best, however, is trust. One of my employees reminded me of that just this morning: nothing compensates for really trusting deeply the people you work with, to do even the tiniest things well and, importantly, on-time.

The challenge of outsourcing is, of course, finding people you trust. And it's hard to do that.

DP uses a few processes to help us find people we trust. One of them is our insistence on "test projects" before we hire anyone, so we can get a sense of the quality of the programmer's work and his discipline as an employee. We have other methods, too, and they might be corporate secrets, or maybe I'll reveal them in future blog entries.

One of the basic challenges is, what happens when someone slips through, and you hire someone but start to have problems? Here are some strategies that are worth articulating at the very least (and I will examine later):

• The Jack Welch strategy is to make sure everyone always knows they're replaceable
• Always use pair programming and other sorts of redundancy, so that people can compensate for each other
• Never reward bad behavior: Be willing to fire people when necessary

More to come later...