… 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 2^nd or 3^rd 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!)