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After Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference last week, Szymon Weglarski and Jon Dorfman, two designers from Brooklyn, decided they would have a little fun with the iPhone 4’s antenna problem.

They designed tiny bandages that fit perfectly around the edge of the iPhone, opened a store on the marketplace site Etsy, and named their new product Antenn-aid. Now the two partners are rushing to keep up with orders.

The two designers are clearly having a little fun with the product. The Antenn-aid Web site says the stickers “work like magical,” poking fun at Apple’s description of the iPad as a “magical and revolutionary product.”

“It’s a lot of satire, it’s kind of a gag product, it’s poking fun at the whole idea of how overblown the whole antenna solution has been,” Mr. Weglarski said. Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

When outsourcing, you can’t manage through the contract, you have to manage through the people. Delegating to a vendor is no different, on a day-by-day basis, than delegating internally. You have to stay close in the beginning to ensure that objectives and success measurements are well understood, the approach makes sense, accountabilities and roles are clarified and the team jells. Then you have to stay close enough throughout the project to see what others aren’t seeing, catalyze the right conversations, and ensure that the right mid-course corrections occur.

In the project above, internal leadership believed that their work was done when the vendor walked in the door. They assumed that the vendor knew what they didn’t know — about how the business and IT operated, the legacy systems, the packaged software, and the new technology platforms. And they were completely dumbfounded when the users revolted against the software.

When internal leaders outsourced the work, they made the mistake of outsourcing the leadership of the work as well.

This is a common outsourcing fallacy, but a crucial one to recognize, because it has led many to believe that there’s little need for senior leadership expertise within IT. That is, since IT is outsourced, leadership can be, too. While it’s true that IT organizations that operate with an extensive network of outsourcing relationships have fewer employees, those that remain have to be much more sophisticated in their ability to exert indirect — versus direct — influence. Read more at blogs.hbr.org