Kate Vitasek
Kate Vitasek is an international authority for her award-winning research and Vested business model for highly collaborative relationships. She is the author of six books on the Vested model and a faculty member at the University of Tennessee. She has been lauded by World Trade Magazine as one of the “Fabulous 50+1” most influential people impacting global commerce.
From this author
University of London Professor David Faulkner has written extensively about the need for cooperative, rather than purely competitive, strategic business relationships and alliances. Since the early 1990s Faulkner has studied the “essence” of competitive strategy, and the challenges involved in integrating cooperation as part of the competitive mindset. One of his books is International Strategic Alliances: Cooperating to Compete (1995). The strategies of...
The “invisible hand” of the market could be giving you a sharp slap more often than not, according to the Nobel laureates George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller.
If you sometimes wonder whether markets always act in your best interest – or if that is even possible given the current state of capitalism – you’re not alone. In their latest and aptly titled book, ...
Stewart Macaulay – Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Wisconsin Law School – occupies a unique place in the evolution, awareness and acceptance of relational contracting. In fact one might safely argue that he helped set relational contract theory in motion in 1957, with the publication of his famous article, ‘Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study.’ He was 26.
Over Macaulay’s long career he has written engagingly and...
Economist and philosopher Deirdre McCloskey has some thought-provoking and highly nuanced takes on innovation and ethics in the commercial arena.
How about this for starters: capitalism is innovation, in her estimation. And she contends that capitalism/innovation backed by liberal economic ideas “has made billions of poor people pretty well off, without hurting other people.” Did I...
Jean Tirole, the French professor of economics who recently received the Nobel Prize, is one of the most influential modern economists for his extensive theories and rigorous mathematic analysis of strategic behaviour and information economics in what is known as “Industrial Organisation” (IO).
As part of his research, he studied firms and markets where a firm had...
Clay Shirky, New York University professor, author, and a leading thinker on the effects of the internet on society, delves into the disruptive power of technology and collaboration on how people live and work.
Born in 1964, Shirky grew up with the cyber age: he’s been writing about the internet since 1996. He’s a deep thinker about it, as reflected in two of his books, Here Comes Everybody: The...
At some point a buyer and supplier will talk about pricing, maybe not right away – but it’s always the elephant in the room. Pricing is also potentially the most volatile topic, and could be a deal-breaker if the negotiation is not handled correctly.
Once the deal is completed the buyer might well wonder: “Am I getting what I’m paying for?” The answer to that question could elicit sweaty palms and a sinking feeling. But actually there are two equally...
If you’ve been in the outsource industry for more than five minutes you probably know that buyer-seller relationships are, well, complicated. And just when you think you have the collaboration thing nailed, more complications can ensue.
Verónica H. Villena (assistant professor of supply chain, Pennsylvania State University), Elena Revilla (professor of operations, Instituto de Empresa Business School), and Thomas Y. Choi (professor of supply chain management at Arizona State...
Do you have one of those really tough business problems that seems to plague you? No matter what you try, nothing seems to solve the problem?
University of California Professor Horst Rittel coined the term “Wicked Problem” in the mid-1960s in lectures that encouraged a moral responsibility for operational researchers “to inform the manager in what respect our ‘solutions’ have failed to tame his wicked problems”. C. West Churchman, a...
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of Psychology at Princeton University, famed for his psychological research into economic science and behavioral economics, laid the foundation for the field of research known as cognitive biases.
His work has been popularised recently in a TED talk, “...