1. Here’s a quiz: In an unsettled economy, should companies:
a) increase hires?
b) employ contractors?
c) outsource to third party companies?
Or how about…
d) none of the above?
Galen Murdock is CEO and Founder of Veracity Solutions, and a pioneer in the
concept of "blendsourced" product development.
(Photo courtesy of Galen Murdock)
Software consulting firm Veracity Solutions, of Salt Lake City, has produced its
own growth on a strategy that the company uses to lift other companies as well.
They call it “Blendsourcing.” The blendsource concept refers to the creation of
high-performance teams using people from both the consulting firm and the client
company. The blended team uses the combined strengths of both companies to
create software—whether for custom use or as marketable products—with more
proficiency, innovation and excellence than before. The concept has been so
successful thus far that it’s becoming more prevalent for other types of companies
and business functions as well.

2. Veracity Solutions specializes in helping companies develop software products
with Microsoft technologies. The company is headed by Founder and CEO Galen
Murdock, who consults with companies ranging from Fortune 100 to startups on all
things software, including web, mobile, native and cloud applications. The
company is 14 years old (Murdock founded the firm at age 26) and now includes
more than 50 experts. They’ve completed some 300 projects in 33 U.S. states and
8 countries so far. They are 4-time Inc. 500 recipients in software (2009-2012) and
boast multi-million dollar project scalability.
Murdock and his team pioneered the blendsourcing concept around the needs of
software development, however, many business functions—human resources,
growth planning, and functional projects such as opening up a new channel or
region are starting to recognize the promise of blendsourcing as well.
For a number of years—dating back to 2002 and perhaps earlier—larger
organizations have demonstrated precursors to the blendsourcing concept. A
study released in May 2012 estimates that 71% of pharmaceutical companies
create and employ cross-company management teams to manage and execute
co-promotions between partnered companies.
Blendsourcing takes the concept to another level with a full philosophical and
functional joining of counterparts. It removes the artificial boundaries that create
cost and can reduce efficiency and limit the full creative “magic” of the various
players involved. “Healing a patient, making a movie, building a killer app, growing
a successful company, building a skyscraper, performing a symphony—there are
many interesting things that benefit from or even require expert blending,” Murdock
explains. So how do you make blendsourcing succeed? Here are the critical steps,
according to Murdock:
5 Steps To Successful Blendsourcing
1. Define a Meaningful Objective. You must understand your objective and
define it clearly, in a way that invites all parties involved to give of their best, be
passionate and understand the “why” behind your goal. Whether you’re creating a
new company, launching a killer app, improving a process, creating a new dessert
or electing a politician, you’ve got to light a meaningful fire so that every member
of the team is motivated and shares your vision.
2. Form a Single Team. Murdock notes that Jim Collins talks in his book
Good to Great about identifying the seats on one bus and making sure those
seats are filled with the right people. Suppress the instinct to form your new team
around departmental or corporate lines. Having the right people in the right seats
is more important than whether they work for the same department or even the
same company. Determining and aligning motivations is key: Someone who is just
financially motivated, for example, may be necessary and right for the short term,
but is not likely to be the partner you continue to engage for the very long term.
Some teams may form for the completion of a particular project. Others may prove
to be such strong philosophical and functional fits they endure for many years as
fluidly as if they were a single company, such as a strong PR partner, a software
development company, or a financial strategy firm.

3. Murdock cites the research of Bruce Tuckman, describing how teams progress
through necessary stages. They “form” and then they “storm” as people jockey for
position and learn how to best work with each other. Some egos may need to be
strengthened and others may be dampened as the team learns to hit the rhythm
that allows it to “norm” and ultimately “perform.”
3. Clarify Expectations. This is where team members ensure they are all
“singing from the same sheet of music” and negotiate to align their desires, needs
and motivations. Once this process is complete, Murdock advises the creation of
two contracts: the paper contract, and an accompanying “relationship contract”
built on trust. “This isn’t just warm, fuzzy rhetoric,” says Murdock. “Executives who
manage projects by trust yield a dividend of 20-40%.” He notes a study from the
Warwick School of Business in the U.K. which analyzed 1,200 outsourced
contracts over a 10-year period. “Those relationships which relied on trust as the
primary driver (versus relying on the stringent service-level agreements written into
the contract) outperformed the value of their contracts by 20-40 percent.” –
Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust, p. 194.
4. Foster a Collaborative Culture. Blendsourcing relies on all team members to
be willing, humble and open to learning new ideas and new ways of working. If you
have succeeded in the steps above, the team will be focused on accomplishing a
shared objective (“what’s right”) and won’t be as concerned about politics,
personal agendas or absolute control (“who’s right”). Murdock advises that a
team’s culture changes most quickly when the primary stakeholders lead by
example — when they serve first. The “Golden Rule” delivers a quick and almost
Karmic return, Murdock says. An abundance mentality yields tremendous, even
miraculous, outcomes as opposed to “command and control.” “This is where team
members replace ‘What’s in it for me?’ with ‘What can we do to help each other
succeed?’” he notes.
5. Develop an “Iterative Cadence” for Delivering Results Together. The team
needs to develop a consistent cadence for their work. This process might adapt
the Build/Measure/Learn loop from the Lean Startup model [theleanstartup.com],
or incorporate principles and practices from agile software development and lean
manufacturing. These models propose working in small bites, or iterations. Each
iteration, which might be as short as a week or as long as 90 days, begins with
light planning, is focused on building meaningful results, and ends with honest and
open feedback about how to improve the entire process. As the current economy
creates a myriad of stellar individual contributors, smaller and more nimble
organizations and free agents, the best innovation and the best way to achieve
complex outcomes, Murdock maintains, will come as the result of blendsourcing.
“It’s the way Pixar works on a movie, the way a doctor and nurses learn to work on
a patient, and the way a software team builds the next killer app.”
Veracity Solutions’ one-line summary of blendsourcing’s ability to influence the shape of
business to come sounds like this: “Delivering results together is the fastest way to build
high-performance teams and breakthrough products.”
Disclosure – My Company Snapp Conner PR has a formal working relationship with Veracity Solutions.