The second question I want to address in screen side chats this week was one posted by Pietro Pappaduono. And he asked, can resource dependence theory explain outsourcing? And here's what he wrote. He said, can resource dependence theory also explain what happens when organizations outsource part of their capability? For example when IT technology, Information Technology, or administrative functions are no longer considered critical or strategic, the company decides to contract these services. It seems to me that when a resource is valuable, resource dependence theory explains why organizations may engage to leverage a situation for survival or competitive advantage. But the same competitive intent, many organizations are disaggregating their value chains to optimize their capability through outsourcing and insourcing resources. Hence I think resource dependence theory applies to resources that are highly sought and those that are considered noncritical. So a lot you uploaded this. And what I wanted to talk about was a variety of your answers. And someone like Paul Burke argued that outsourcing is really a converse of a merger and that was kind of interesting. And Mark Donkersloot also kind of reinforced this. So they started talking a little bit about the notion of an internal versus external resource, that mergers are concerned with kind of growing a company whereas outsourcing is about cutting out features that are more of an external resource that one that's part of the internal core of technology of a firm. It's kind of what was implied, that you outsource when things are not critical. And outsourcing tends to solve a problem. And that internal resources, you can't really help with. And so someone like Harry Tucker articulates that. And he also mentioned homegrown outsourcing. So within your firm, you start to diversify your divisions and they have their own control over things. And by doing that, you have kind of a homegrown kind of diversification or segmentation of your organization that looks like an alliance, but was really kind of merged from the company. So it's as opposed to merger, it's splitting, partitioning. And so that was kind of interesting, and Harry Tucker tended to suggest that as an opposite process possibly. Nicole Bryan said that outsourcing is problematic because it kind of creates dependence. And that when you outsource, you lose competence. You've given away some of your knowledge resource or your technology in the process. So in some ways, that always kind of reinforcing the idea of this being the opposite process of mergers. However, Ruth Jones I thought had a really nice insight that fits the reading well in that she articulated basically that, here let me try to find that there, it seems to be covered by the theory even though it's internal. The description of buffering strategies, of adjusting scale in particular, use examples of schools getting rid of their performing arts or foreign language courses to focus on their core technology. So if the thing you are outsourcing is not part of your core, then stripping it out of your organization could be explained by resource dependence theory. The only thing is you're still going to need IT, admin services, whatever. So you're increasing rather than decreasing your external dependencies. You're now dependent on your outsourced partner, but in some cases maybe this is worth it to protect your core. So that in some ways, I think Ruth you're exactly on target. The way that Resource Dependence Theory would have explained Outsourcing is one of adjusting scale. It's buffering your core. You usually don't downsize or outsource your core technology. You try to protect that. You're trying to cleave off parts of the firm that are less central. And by doing that, you protect in the time of, say, a budgetary crisis, the core is functioning. It may also be the thing that some of your notice those that a mail should means of improving the function of your firm. That by having competing interest out there in the environment to provide say sub contracting of cafeteria work or janitorial work. That what you are doing is actually, instead of doing it in-house, you are finding a more efficient company outside that can provide it at scale to many companies and do a better job. And this is going to be more and more of a topic of interest within the network form of organization that we talk about next week. That, this kind of effort of creating networks of provision that your company doesn't have to do everything, that it can subcontract out and outsource things and create kind of a network of these efforts as long as it and that enables it to actually focus on its core technology and provide a better product. So, that's kind of something we'll see next week and we can debate further whether through that, you do give up a little bit of control, say, on the less central tasks and technologies to your firm. But that you also enable yourself greater control and organizational learning, perhaps even, on your core technology and its improvement. So I think there's tradeoffs here, but a lot of you picked up on these differences. And hopefully I've brought some clarity to the thread and your questions about it.