Strategic Outsourcing Professionals

I have been busy the past few weeks so I figured I would post a lighter story discussing my recent business travel. This past week, we went to our facility in Central America to perform a capability and gap assessment of our current operations. While this trip was very productive, my favorite part was exchanging stories with colleagues about our outsourcing experiences. After reading this post, you may want to review invoices more closely for unusual charges. They just might be entertaining enough for you to share; just like this particular line item - One (1) Mean Monkey: 50,000 Rupees.

In India, cows roam the crowded streets, elephants dominate the bus lanes and children can stop traffic with cricket games in alleys. However, there is no substitute for the army of wild monkeys that have invaded the capital city of New Delhi. Monkeys may be cute, but they are actually quite destructive, aggressive, territorial and dirty animals.

Wild monkeys in New Delhi have invaded rooftops of operations centers across the city. When this happens, monkeys will become an immediate nuisance to your employees. They are known to break-off roof tiles, destroy power lines, rip down rain gutters and pick employee pockets. If that is not enough, their hoots and howls have been known to penetrate concrete walls. Employee focus, productivity and efficiency are quickly impacted if monkeys are allowed to settle into facility rooftops. If the problem is not actively addressed, a pack of monkeys can destroy buildings. Now, add the cost of a new roof with the increased distraction of construction, and you have a pretty expensive and complicated problem. When you put all the pieces together, the lost employee productivity, efficiency and cost associated with property damage can be a serious constraint to facility margins. It is definitely a problem that needs a resourceful solution.

So, how do you solve the problem? Well, the answer is easy - find a monkey handler and outsource a ‘Mean Monkey’. Mean monkeys will not assimilate with other monkeys and will infiltrate monkey packs to disband the group. Further, they will proceed to take on the territory as their own. By releasing a mean monkey on your roof, you will guarantee that all the nuisance monkeys will soon move to another rooftop. Then, the only worry is the one mean monkey on the roof. If you throw him some bananas and dates, he will call your rooftop home and then you don’t have to worry about future monkey infiltration.

While this story explains the logic and business need of procuring a mean monkey, I started thinking about more innovative solutions. Realistically, if monkeys move to another roof they become someone else’s problem. That just doesn’t seem like an ethical service or business. Given my nature and personality, my entrepreneurial spirit got the best of me. There must be a way to scale and grow a monkey business. I thought hard about how I could profit by combating the India monkey problem. I came up with the options below.

1. I can launch an extermination business? PETA might not approve of this, but then again, India is a long flight for animal rights activists to stage a protest. Although, given what PETA does protest, it wouldn’t surprise me if some folks made the journey. The last thing I want to be is the individual responsible for triggering the establishment of an Indian PETA affiliate group. For this reason, I am not sure primate extermination is the best idea.

2. I could breed a terminator monkey. When you think about it, humans with extra Y chromosomes are overly aggressive and usually find themselves in jail by the time they are eighteen. Monkeys with an extra Y chromosome will ensure aggressive and potentially ‘terminating’ behavior. I could probably guarantee quality with a genetically engineered monkey. On the flip-side, monkey clean-up may become a new problem, and costs for genetically engineered primates may get expensive. Further, Arnold Schwarzenegger might be displeased that his movies motivated my business plan. I think profits may struggle with this model.

3. I could develop a humane way to capture and release monkeys? I guess I could argue that this doesn’t really solve the problem if monkeys continue to return to rooftops, but then again, profits may be solid with a recurring revenue model. Maybe this could also spin-off a business to help fight deforestation so the monkeys have a habitat of their own. Who knows, I may be Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for my work to fight global warming while providing a humane way to relocate hundreds of thousands of monkeys from New Delhi. Better yet, I may be able to join Al Gore - Brad Rubin, Nobel Peace Prize Winner.

Ugh, I don’t know what the best solution is for the problem.

Do you think if the vendor just accepted the mean monkey as a cost of providing service, I wouldn’t be thinking about all this monkey business? I am going bananas!