Advantages of an “alien” perspective
Inc. Magazine has an article from last May called The Thinking Man’s Outsourcing. It’s an interesting, if somewhat run-of-the mill, overview of a few companies that are outsourcing their software development overseas.
However, it includes an interesting story about Brian Reale, CEO of a business software company called Colosa. Mr. Reale outsourced his company — and himself — to La Paz, Bolivia, where he could climb mountains and hire developers for 1/8th the cost of their US counterparts.
The interesting bit is that culture shock led to the creation of a new product for the company:
Reale and [co-founder Robert] Vernon launched Colosa to build an online marketplace for insurance companies. But while overseeing that product’s creation, Reale found himself coping with really long lines. In Bolivia, “you see lines of people three or four blocks long waiting to fill out a form or get a license,” says Reale. “The Spanish word for that is tramite. We saw an opportunity to build a system to reduce tramite.”
They built this system, and it turned out to solve bigger problems for companies wanting to do business in Bolivia and beyond. They now have more than 1,000 customers in the U.S.
There are opportunities in 1) understanding there is a problem, and 2) having a viable framework to resolve the problem. Having an “alien” perspective could allow you to see problems that “locals” may not, and may provide you with frameworks that may help solve them.
Posted on February 14, 2007
Filed Under Culture |
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