Many companies look at sourcing decisions like outsourcing as a one-time event, whereby functions to be outsourced are considered, vendors evaluated, and transition plans developed. While these steps are obviously necessary before you can move a function to an outside vendor, some consideration should be put into the processes themselves. Designing your business processes as discrete, well-understood components, in short designing portable processes, results in far more flexibility in the long run.

Economic and market forces are constantly changing the environment in which organizations must do business. If your processes are analyzed only as part of a major effort like an outsourcing project, you are likely to constantly be six months behind the economic curve-planning for a sourcing change tomorrow in reaction to yesterday's economic climate.

While not as exciting as a large change effort, constantly evaluating your processes to ensure that they can be moved to the right group of "doers" and can be turned on and off rapidly makes from an extremely flexible organization. If a product becomes unprofitable, its support processes can rapidly be moved or abandoned, and equally rapidly reactivated. Simplicity is usually the hallmark of a portable process, so seeking standardization and ease in your back office can give you market and customer-service flexibility where it really matters: in delighting your paying customers.

One of the great productivity tips I have received is the two minute rule: any task that can be completed in two minutes or less should be done immediately. While this is conceptually simple, consider all those items that could be done in two minutes that you tend to defer. For me it was opening and considering that new piece of mail, or an email that required a response. It was usually easier to defer these tasks, leaving the item in the physical or electronic inbox, only to do the exact same exercise a few days later. When I tracked the time spent considering, deferring, then repeating this cycle, far more than two minutes was spent on an item that would likely take that amount of time to just complete.

The corollary to the two minute rule is to consider these types of items only when you have the time and mental focus to devote an undivided two minutes to them. Attempting to sort through mail during the 20 second walk from the mailbox usually results in a pile of half-opened envelopes and little else.  In addition to acting on items when appropriate, having the discipline to leave something alone when you do not have the two minutes to devote to it is also more productive in the long run.

The impact of speaking with someone face to face seems increasingly profound, especially when contrasted to an era of online communication, where nuance, body language, and often basic civility are stripped away from the interaction.

In online communities, people are quick to gun down an opposing view, cavalierly throwing about insults and groundless accusations that during a physical interaction would at best land one a stern look, and perhaps a blow to the face. Before the popular explosion of the Internet, I had rarely heard someone accused of being a Nazi with any seriousness, and now in discussions as trivial as which trash service my neighborhood housing board selects has resulted in exactly that label being bandied about.

Perhaps the security of a quiet room save for the hum of one's Macbook gives a false sense of impunity; how can one be held responsible for violating interpersonal norms when interacting in a fully impersonal manner? Yet just as online interactions have a machine-like coldness, they also have a machine's memory. One's off color remarks, poorly-considered email, belittling of other people and their opinions, and yes, accusations of trash pickup-related Nazism will remain visible to all who care to look, effectively forever. If not for the sake of basic civility, perhaps self-preservation will cause us to think twice before clicking the "send" button.

In case you missed them, my regular column on CBS' Tech Republic contained the following articles in the month of October:

Four tips for Breakthrough IT executives

Turn the power of the purchasing department in your favor

A 50K solution to a $500 problem

What Presidents Bush and Obama can teach IT leaders

I tend to bristle at any suggestion of trans-national government entities passing sweeping rulings that transcend domestic voters, but I am finally ready and willing to accept global governance in one area: power outlets. As I have travelled internationally I have acquired a pile of plug adapters for various countries. The chunky and unwieldy UK plug squeezed next to a svelte, contortionist mainland Chinese plug, which looks a bit like a US plug with the various prongs rotated for no discernable reason.

Speaking of China, most of my travels there impressed me with the presence of universal power outlets. Complex looking things with what appeared to be about twenty oddly-sized holes that accepted all electrical comers. This contrasts mightily with Italy, which not only seems to have abandoned the European standard plug, but lacks any agreement within our own apartment. The bedroom plugs appear deceptively European, yet have a smaller hole and different spacing than most EU plugs, making for several minutes of frustrated huffing and puffing as I tried to jam my EU adapters into them.

Our living room on the other hand makes no pretence of standardization, with a funky EU-style plug with a third prong thrown in just to be different. We also have a couple of EU-standard jacks, making our apartment an electrical "melting pot" of sorts, and invariably the device you wish to power had the wrong plug for the nearest outlet.

Should we wish to plug in one of our US devices, we require a series of several converters, in the worst case going from Italian three-prong, to Italian two prong, to a power strip with EU standard plugs, to a US converter and finally whatever device requires power. This of course is a source of great joy to our 9-month old son, who proceeds to disassemble, tug cords, and occasionally attempt to jam his tongue into one of the many electrical outlets.