Kate Vitasek

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About: 

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

Jan 02, 2014    0

It is likely that no other subject gets as much attention when two companies are entering, or extending, their outsourcing business relationship as the effort to come up with a fair pricing structure. Money is money after all, and money talks. You know the drill by now: the conventional procurement process pits buyers and sellers on opposite sides of the table – and there’s no way around it, right? Wrong!

The classical and conventional approach to negotiating employs...

Oct 16, 2013    0

I’ve been a game theory fan for many years, particularly as it relates to showing that cooperative behavior indeed creates true “win-win” situations. So I was excited to read a work of University of Pennsylvania professors Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin, ‘From Extortion to Generosity, Evolution in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma‘, published...

Oct 02, 2013    0

If your recent experiences with new or renewal contract negotiations are something akin to visiting the dentist for a root canal, we’d like to introduce you to a much better – and pain-free! – way to go about negotiating. It’s called Getting to We: a five-step process for crafting business relationships with the intent to drive collaborative partnerships.

Getting to We is based on what we call a “what’s-in-it-for-we” (WIIFWe) mindset. The...

Sep 06, 2013    0

This month Academics of Outsourcing highlight goes to professors Jeffrey H. Dyer and Harbir Singh for their influential work on the topic on what they call the “relational view,” of working in highly strategic alliances.

Dyer (the Horace Pratt Beesley Professor of Global Strategy at the Marriott School at Brigham Young University) and Singh (the Edward H. Bowman Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia) explored...

Jul 30, 2013    0

What can a professor who teaches democratic theory tell us about collaborative, non-coercive business and outsourcing relationships?

Actually, Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Harvard Kennedy School, tells us quite a lot. Mansbridge, in three important white papers and articles, “Taking Coercion Seriously,” “Conflict and Self-Interest in Deliberation,” and “What Does the Ideal of Deliberative Democracy...

Jun 27, 2013    0

When I hear Daniel Corsten speak about collaboration and trust in business relationships it’s music to my ears.

Corsten, a professor at the IE business school, has been a pioneer in the study of collaborative relationships dating back to being a founding academic of the Efficient Consumer Response Initiative (ECR), a major worldwide collaborative movement in the retail industry. He wrote a...

May 30, 2013    0

This month’s blog honours best-selling author Cynthia Barton Rabe, author of The Innovation Killer. Tragically, Rabe passed away in 2011, killed by a hit and run driver at age 47—just five years after her revolutionary book on innovation was published.

Rabe’s lessons follow nicely after my ...

Apr 18, 2013    0

If you are familiar with the Vested approach and the books and articles I’ve written on collaboration and trust, you know about the importance I place on sharing value in business relationships.

You might say it’s the way that capitalism will take business and value creation to a new and more sustainable level in the twenty-first century. And it’s also why I’ve taken much too long to write about...

Apr 10, 2013    0


This article was co-authored by Rob Urbanowicz, Principal and Owner of The Geehan Group, and originally appeared in Outsource magazine Issue #31 Spring 2013.


As the outsourcing market has matured over the last 15 years, many service providers have developed capabilities that go beyond the original scope of delivery to their...

Mar 08, 2013    0

I often talk about the need for insightful governance as an essential part of business frameworks. In fact, it’s what Vested’s Rule 5 is all about. So I was happy to learn about the work of two scholars from Italy’s University of Salerno who have taken this idea a vital step forward.

Giovanni Vaia and Aurelio Tommasetti are fellow...

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