Category Archives: Market Intelligence

Yes I’m Okay, But I Am Very Angry. You Should Be Too! (Part 2)

… it’s about getting it right (and not being right) … and all these influencers care about is what gets the clicks, whether it is right for Procurement or not, because whatever gets them likes and subscribes in their book is being right. Unlike THE REVELATOR, they’re not interested in meaningful discussion, constructive debate, educating you, or at least inspiring you to think critically and improve your knowledge and understanding of your field. Influencers only want the clicks, like, and subscribes that give them their next dopamine hit (and strengthen their belief that fortune will follow fame) and metrics that will allow them to get sponsors (whose messages they’ll never question) to keep going.

But, now more than ever, you need to make the right decision for you. Not only are you

  • under-staffed,
  • under-tooled, and
  • under-resourced

in Procurement, but expected to deliver with constant change in the

  • economic landscape,
  • political landscape,
  • technology landscape,
  • services landscape, and
  • funding landscape

which will often entirely invalidate everything you did and knew yesterday. More specifically:

  • an unexpected trade war will decimate a carefully crafted supply chain you’ve been curating for over a decade,
  • a geopolitical dispute, special military action, attack, or war will spark sanctions and totally close borders
  • companies come, merge, get acquired, and go every day; changing, replacing, and then taking their technology to the grave
  • services companies keep popping up, changing the toolsets they use, altering the toolsets (via partnerships) they offer you, as well as their roster — and just like it’s not the analyst firm, it’s the analyst, it’s not the firm, it’s the consultant (you want an experienced consultant, at least intermediate, and definitely not a junior consultant fresh out of grad school with no real world experience and nothing but a Chat-GPT subscription — which you are very likely to get at a Big X training so many “consultants” on AI)
  • funding mania comes and goes; when it comes, money flows like a waterfall; when it goes; it dries up like a desert; this hastens both new product development and productization as well as company bankruptcy (when the firm over invests, doesn’t see the growth, and drops the tech company faster than a hot potato)

You need insight. You need knowledge. You need education. Not influence bullshit. Because without the insight, knowledge, and education, you have no chance of making a decision that will:

  • identify the possibility of tariffs decimating a particular supply chain, so you know where to focus your risk mitigation efforts (it’s too late if you’re just reacting post tariff because, by then, there ain’t much you can do about it)
  • have the right systems in place to switch to secondary sources if a sanction or border closure comes into effect
  • select a technology provider with a solution that solves the majority of your day-to-day problems efficiently, effectively, and empathically (that works with your business model and mindset)
  • select a services provider with personnel with the right experience and toolset to support you
  • select a technology provider at an appropriate risk threshold; for example, a P2P provider that you depend on for daily transactions needs to be stable; an auxiliary experimental analytics/fraud identification solution is not as critical, if the provider disappears, you will be okay while you select and implement a replacement (although you may want to delay the actual payments until you get a new fraud detection solution in place, but with SaaS, that can be done in a week or two if you maintained the RFP information and just go to your 2nd or 3rd choice)

We need to remember that technology project failure rates have reached an all time high of 88% (in the two and a half decades of project failure the big analyst firms and consultancies have been tracking technology project failure since the late ’90s), inflation is back with a vengeance, consumer demand is flatlining in most first world countries with declining birth rates, non-renewable raw material supplies are getting scarcer and scarcer, and your job is only going to get harder with each passing day.

You need help, not bullshit. And the fact that all these influencers is doing is echoing the

  • soundbite driven drivel vendor marketing
  • analyst firms pushing the current hype and the unproven claims
  • vendors shoving Gen-AI into every nook and cranny and down your throat (whether it is appropriate or not)
  • consultants only spreading the FOMO and FUD

and collectively drowning out the few remaining educators left is just appalling. So, yes, I’m angry. And you should be too!

(And yes, I can curate my feeds to keep influencer content mostly out of them, and do, even going so far as to potentially remove you if you push their drivel my way, but that’s not the point! I know the difference between insight and drivel. Without education, a junior buyer / new Procurement professional doesn’t! And that’s why these influencers make me mad and need to go!)

Yes I’m Okay, But I Am Very Angry. You Should Be Too! (Part 1)

Apparently my influencer rants last week caused some concern among my fellow educators with regards to my health, or at least my mental health, so I’d like to assure you all that yes I am okay, but yes I am very (VERY) angry … and you should be too!

As I pointed out in some of my responses to the three LinkedIn posts that advertised my influencer week content, namely:

It’s bad enough we have to deal with:

  • a constant stream of sound-bite driven, education free marketing
  • analysts pushing these unproven claims (and then telling the buyers it’s their fault when the technology fails for buying into the technology their analyst firm relentlessly promoted)
  • vendors shoving (Gen-)AI into every nook and cranny, which not only fails to add value, but often decreases it (see: Mythbusting 2025 2015 Procurement Predictions and Trends! Part 12, for example)
  • consultants spreading the FOMO-FUD at constant Red-Alert levels

 

but now we have to deal with wannabe influencers with very little knowledge and experience in Procurement inundating social media/LinkedIn with obvious statements at best, useless content most of the time, and aggravated FOMO once they get hired by a vendor(‘s social media marketing company).

And that doesn’t help you. Not one bit. In fact, it hurts you. As the doctor wrote in Why the doctor is NOT an Influencer! Part I, as a Procurement professional, you’re unappreciated, overworked, denied the tools that would make your job easier, and blamed for everything that goes wrong. You laugh when you see the Monday.com commercial that shows people underwater by 10 am because you’re underwater 24/7/365 days a year (366 in leap years). You struggle to find a few minutes a day to read something that isn’t one of the three hundred new messages that hit your inbox overnight. If you’re dedicating a few minutes a day to read something, there better be a reward in it for you. It better at least spark a usable idea if it doesn’t give you one. You don’t need to spend 20 minutes reading five posts that tell you less than you already know. You need insight.

And, if you’re at the top of your game, like the doctor, you’d happily spend 8 to 12 minutes to read a deep 4 page article that actually makes you think or gives you real insight on a vendor’s platform than read 4 short LinkedIn posts that give you nothing more than recycled marketing sound bites. Because you need information. You need insight. You need education. Not bullshit laden clickbait designed to get the influencer likes. After all, as THE REVELATOR says …

2025 Is Just Another Year … But Is It All Doom and Gloom? Part 6 (Wayward Son)

The real answer is: yes (for the majority) and no (for the minority). So be in the minority. And continue to

Keep Calm and Carry On

Ignore the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that the vendors and analyst firms are trying to instill in you on a daily basis in an effort to get you to buy, buy, buy something that you probably don’t need and definitely won’t work for you. (Just remember that tech project failure rate has reached an all time high of 88% [and climbing]. The more FUD you fall for, the more failure you’ll see in return.)

It’s not about the shiny new hotness, it’s about what actually solves your problems and works for you. And, as I’m not sorry to say, more often than not in back office data processing (which Procurement is), it’s usually the Old Busted Hotness that gets the job done.

Moreover, the fundamentals of problem identification and problem solving HAVE NOT changed.

  1. Understand the problem
  2. Formulate the problem
  3. Find the root cause
  4. Identify potential solutions
  5. Evaluate potential solutions (independent of marketing or underlying tech)
  6. Select and implement a solution

And you can do this using one or more general problem solving strategies. Moreover, if you need to understand the underlying tech, you can employ an expert to help you. When it comes to solution selection, the right consultants are cheap, especially when they have a solid foundation in Tech and the Domain in which you are trying to solve the problem, and you don’t, and these consultants already know a large number of potential solutions to help you evaluate. (Sometimes hundreds of them.) (Need help finding the right consultant? You can always contact the doctor.)

Furthermore, while it could be difficult to figure out the process you should be using and the system you should be using to implement the process, there are expert consultants who can help you map what you have, explain the art of the possible, explain the pros and cons of each process choice, and come up with the real requirements for a solution RFP (which should NOT be a list of feature and functions, and should not specify the how, only the what — and if you don’t understand why, engage a technology expert to help you with the solution/technology RFP and DO NOT use a FREE RFP Template as they are all lies)!

Roll Up Your Sleeves

Staples lied to you and all of the vendors repeat the lies daily. There is NO Big Red Easy Button. There is no Magic Gen-AI solution. There will be no Agentric AI that will come along and make your job super easy — and if you are using any of your intelligence whatsoever to make strategic decisions, the technology will not replace you. (But properly applied, it will enhance your performance beyond belief … you’ll be able to do the work of ten (10) or more peers! Now, this might be bad news for your peers if they can’t adapt and aren’t near the top of their game, but fortunately for us, talent is super scarce in Procurement and no one who’s good at their job should be in danger of losing it, as long as they are willing to skill up and keep performing).

But you will need to do a LOT of work to figure out what you need, why you need it, how you employ it, how you will utilize it most effectively, how you will achieve the ROI, and how you will build and sell the business plan. Then you have to manage the vendor selection process properly, the implementor/integrator process properly, the training and adoption process (because it’s NOT a matter of if you buy it they will use it, it’s more like if you buy it they will do everything they can to bypass it until it is easier to use the system than bypass it and everyone understands it). And when it comes to training the ML/AI enabled systems and verifying their recommendations, you won’t just need your brain on full, but your research skills on full as these systems are so convincing even when the recommendation is the worst recommendation possible that lesser minds will just accept the recommendation blindly.

Be ready to use your Human Intelligence (HI!)

The more advanced the technology gets, the MORE you need to use your human intelligence. Your job will get much more mentally challenging, as it will soon revolve entirely around strategy and system training (and, of course, human relations — what the technology cannot do), as the promises of an easy life multiply. However, once you select, implement, train, and wrap your mind around the new technology, the (physical) effort and drudgery you will have to employ will decrease significantly as that is the work that will be turned entirely over to the system. A human intelligence that can properly make use of augmented intelligence is the one that will enable Procurement to thrive.

And Remember

Just because 2025 is just another year, that doesn’t mean it has to be another year of struggle. Just because vendors won’t make a difference; analyst firms won’t make a difference; and the C-Suite likely won’t see beyond their desperate need for cost savings (if only to increase profit so the CEO can take home a few more million dollars he doesn’t need); that doesn’t mean you can’t make a difference. As we’ve pointed out, we’ve reached a point where you can, even with very little budget to help you. You just need to do it, start saving, and use those savings to invest in more tools and processes that create more value. But you have to take the lead. It’s up to you.