The course that's missing from every MBA curriculum

This is a repost of an article by MBA venture capitalist John Gannon.  

“How to outsource” – a course where you have to build something (that actually works) using only offshore teams or individuals.

Syllabus is simple. Give each student $500 in credit on eLance/oDesk and let ‘er rip. Students can pool resources to build bigger/cooler stuff or they can go it alone. Throw in a mentor or two who have run some serious but scrappy outsourced dev projects to help people when they start flailing.

Benefits to the students are huge:

• They learn how to hire, fire, and manage freelancers. Lots of MBAs have zero management experience so this is a good training ground for those all important ‘HR’ like functions.
  
• They learn some of the tools of distributed development (e.g. Github, Trello).
  
• They’ll learn what is possible to build based on the $ constraints (i.e. What can $500 ‘really’ buy you).
  
• There will be wide variance in the quality and cost of the final products. Therefore, lots of ‘lessons learned’.
  
• Just maybe they build something super cool that they can keep working on or build into a real venture.
  

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I think the above is increasingly relevant, not only for Western companies that contract work offshore, but also for local companies in the PH that get work done through freelancers. What this means is that if you're the manager, and of course as an MBA student you need to know this ahead, you'll have to deal with a diff set of issues:  

• how to ensure quality when you don't get to easily see the output or the person you're working with (something that can be explained in one minute will have to take longer as you need to craft carefully worded notes that detail what you want)
  
• how to build efficient communication (you'll have to deal with a lot of Skype calls and email exchanges)
  
• how to ensure commitment (freelancers are not totally invested in your company and may have commitments elsewhere too)
• how to ensure confidentiality (i've heard of issues with freelancers who post confidential projects on their public portfolio)
• how to trust, and many others

Also, how do you build competency when your resources leave the moment a project ends?

These are some of the things MBA students need to prepare for, and sadly these are not being taught right now. Oftentimes one has to contend with real life as a place to practice. This should be ok, except that the costs of failing are just too high.