As I stated in a response to Jon THE REVELATOR Hansen in his comment on my M&A Mania post,

How is a newly minted Procurement professional with no training, no support, and very little technical training supposed to find the educational resources she needs to learn what she needs to progress in the overwhelming tsunami of marketing sound bites and influencer dribble?

Especially when, every other day, you have some yahoo PR person at Vendor X picking 10 random people and calling them “procurement thought leaders” and telling you to follow those individuals when the PR person doesn’t even appear to have a real Procurement thought in his head to begin with and has no clue who the experts are and aren’t? And, more importantly, which of these “thought leaders” will actually try to educate you vs dribble influencer garbledy-gook at you in hopes of getting another subscribe.

For the majority of these people, it’s all about subscribers, and not about actually helping you.

At the end of the day, all that most of them care about is:

• the ego boost when they can say that after only 2 years they have way more subscribers than you
• the nickel and dime subscriptions they will convince you to sign up for (because those can apparently add up if you get thousands of them, but I’ll never know because I’ve never charged a reader and I never will)
• the notoriety they get that will help them land a high profile job and a higher paycheck

And when that last one happens, say sayonara to them as their blog/site/newsletter will be shut down faster than a greased pig powered by greased lightening.

If they even last that long.

For those of you who only entered Procurement in the last decade, I know you probably don’t know who I am (as I ignored linked in while at Spend Matters because that was the job of marketing) and I’m fine with that (because I don’t want you following me or chewing up my site resources until you’re ready to stop chasing these 15-second-of-famers and start learning, but more on that later), but you need to know this:

Sourcing Innovation, only six months younger than Spend Matters, is the second oldest independent Procurement blog/site in the space [June 2006] (with THE REVALATOR‘s Procurement Insights being the third [May 2007]) and the one with the most FREE educational content sitting there for your perusal and consumption (with over 6,000 articles, which is now considerably more than Spend Matters since the great purge of ’23 during the site upgrade and 3 times that of Procurement Insights — but it wouldn’t be fair of me to not note that THE REVELATOR was one of the first to venture into regular podcasting for a while and has an archive of those podcasts that SI doesn’t have).

Over these past eighteen (18) years I have seen over a dozen dozen blogs / independent sites (that’s 144 for those of you who don’t like mental math) come and go, along with over a dozen major publications and “associations”, with a considerable majority of these influencer blogs/newsletters fizzling out within 3 years when the newly minted blogger / thought leader / influencer didn’t get the fame and fortune they expected and decided it was just too much work for too little, or, in most cases, NO, return. (And if they got noticed and got a nice job offer by someone desperate for some expertise, bye bye blog.)

Side note: For those without the long term memory, from ’07 to ’17 I maintained a resource site that tracked, among other things, all of all the blogs, publications, associations, annual events, webinars, vendors, and consulting firms, so when I say I’ve seen over a dozen dozen come and go, I mean it. (For those who don’t know the history, I stopped because I started working with Spend Matters in 2016, and thus suspended conflicting sponsorships and I wasn’t going to continue it for free because it was a massive amount of work that brought no value to me and little to my readers relative to other efforts I could focus on [especially when vendors couldn’t even be bothered to fill out a simple web-form for their events and listings] — but Spend Matters did have the Almanac, did track and advertise the important events (for a while), and did provide some of this service to the space.)

In short, most of these “thought leaders” or “influencers” aren’t here for the right reasons, and of those that are, most of them won’t stick around for the long haul when they realize the financial return is not here.

But this is not my biggest problem with these “thought leader” and “influencer” lists, because we’ve always had people out for fame and fortune, and always will. My biggest problem is that they don’t help you, even the well intentioned ones.

The average level of Procurement maturity today, unfortunately, is not much better than it was two decades ago when those of us in the space since the beginning (by 2000) started writing about it, along with what was needed process, training, and technology wise to make it better. As a result, you don’t need “thought leadership”, you need “executable advice” and “real-world education” that can help you improve your understanding, processes, and platforms (with proper selection) to get you to the next level, or at least through your job today. And you need no nonsense advice to help you cut through all the sound-bites, buzzwords, and marketing hogwash that you are linguistically assaulted with on a daily basis. Not some feel good life stories, fantasies, or divine prophecies that may never come to pass.

And not only do you need this education, you need it from someone who will still be here tomorrow, the day after, next month, and next year and will stay here until they are found dead hunched over whatever replaces the laptop writing yet one more article to try and help you be a better Procurement professional, which THE REVELATOR has stated is how he expects to be found. Furthermore, nless technology improves to the point where I trust AI dictation and editing software, it’s likely how I’ll be found as well.

And while there are again hundreds of want to be “thought leaders” and “influencers” (like there were about two years after I started), there are still very few I trust will still be here in two years after the next big market reset (which THE REVELATOR predicts will affect 3 in 4 companies), as there are very few now that have been around 4 or more years, who have been through good and bad times, and who have demonstrated they are here to stay, no matter what hardship is thrown their way.

But where’s that list?!?!?

Unfortunately, only in the heads of those of us who’ve been here since the early days and seen so many come and go, and that’s where it will stay because you can’t create a lot of regular bullshit PR posts when you can only make one or two ten educators to follow lists.

So if you truly want to learn, do your research and find those of us who’ve been around providing free advice for over a decade, while sometimes living like penniless artists, because we believe education is paramount for the space to progress and get the recognition it deserves.

Or if you just want entertainment, or a good story, go watch a TED talk instead. It will be more inspiring and more useful in the long run.

And unless you want education, direct advice, truth, and a constant attack on the massive levels of bullcr@p in today’s marketing that have reached peaks that have never been seen in the 29-year history of our space^*, don’t follow me!

(As Bif Naked would say:
GET OFFA ME! AWAY FROM ME! GET ME OUTA HERE!
LET GO OF ME! DON’T FOLLOW ME! DON’T WANNA BE YOUR LEADER!

I want to educate, not lead. Besides, as I said before, I’ve been there and done that. ^#)

 

^* FreeMarkets, the first Procurement company, was founded in 1995; it was later acquired by Ariba, which was later acquired by SAP as their Source to Pay platform that all of you who have had to use it love and hate today.

^# Before Spend Matters in ’16 (to ’22), Sourcing Innovation (and vendor consulting) was my full time job, my goal was to pay the bills (though not necessarily live well) off of SI alone, and I did. From 2008 onward, I tracked the stats on the site and every third party ranking engine (there used to be five big ones: Alexa, Traffic Estimate, Quantcast, Compete, Ranking). Between 2009 and 2014 SI regularly took the top spot away from Spend Matters, even when THE PROPHET built out a small team and it was just me at Sourcing Innovation. So, yeah, been there, done that, held the top spot and it’s not as glamorous as this new generation of “influencers” thinks it is. And yes, if you go wayback through the archives, the stats are still there to prove it.