Author Archives: thedoctor

Technology DOES NOT Solve Your Talent Problem!

And any claims to the contrary are a considerable collection of cow cr@p!

So, needless to say, the doctor was disgusted at this thinly disguised advertorial by, and for, Amazon Business, which said technology, i.e. its platform, would solve your talent problem.

Not even close!

According to the advertorial, which appeared, appallingly, in USA Today:

While some churn may be inevitable, organizations can take steps to ensure their procurement teams are satisfied. One major step is ensuring they have the technology they need to do their jobs effectively.

Which is important, but not a major step.

If you ask people what they want in a job, which Gallup did in a survey to 13,085 US employees in 2022, it was:

  1. A significant increase in income or benefits (64%)
  2. Greater work-life balance and better personal wellbeing (61%)
  3. The ability to do what they do best (58%)
  4. Greater stability and job security (53%)
  5. Vaccination policies that align with my beliefs (43%)
  6. The organization is diverse and inclusive of all types of people (42%)

the doctor would bet with certainty that not a single respondent said “better technology” in their top five wants. As he repeatedly points out, which he did yet again in why do successful solution providers ruin everything by becoming tech companies?, no one wants tech or software … no one. They just want whatever makes their job easier, and that ain’t always fancy new tech.

At best, it’s a minor step that can enhance the ability to do what they do best.

Then it quotes their VP who says that since 74% of leaders seeing digitization as­­ key to better operations, the interpretation must be it’s clear we need seamless, consumer-like experiences in business procurement because this is what we are used to.

No! NO! NO! Joël Collin-Demers recently penned a great post on why we need to stop chasing an “Amazon-like” buying experience for requesters in your business! In short, in business, it’s inefficient, ineffective, and downright unpleasant. As Joël says, it’s the paradox of choice.

B2B is not the same as B2C, it’s never been, and never should be. So assuming that B2C is the solution is just plain wrong. B2B needs different solutions customized for the needs of bulk buyers.

The really depressing part about the article is they quote a lot of studies by reputable organizations with really concerning findings about just how bad the talent problem is and give a lot of good advice on what kinds of technology a Procurement organization should have in place. It’s too bad they chose to wrap it in a layer of cow cr@p and sully what could have been a good article on why a company should have a Procurement solution run by good talent (two different problems, two different arguments). They could have written the most credible piece USA Today ever published on the subject, but instead decided to pen some self-service BS rubbish with bad arguments and known wrong conclusions.

The only good thing the doctor can say about it is at least they didn’t mention the Gen-AI bullcr@p when they talked about the use of AI in procurement and got that part right at least!

Here’s the thing, if you have a talent problem, it usually comes down to one of two reasons:

  • you haven’t been able to / can’t hire enough talent
  • the talent you have is leaving

If you can’t hire enough talent, that’s usually because you can’t attract enough talent, and that’s usually because you aren’t hitting the top 6 points in the gallup poll referenced above. You need to step back and

  • evaluate your standard offer (pay and benefits) against the local & global industry norms
  • analyze your work life balance options
  • assess the freedom and control you give employees to do their job
  • gauge the job security you offer
  • minimize your (lack of) vaccination policy (which, if it exists, should match the jurisdiction in which your employee resides — i.e. you comply with legal requirements, and that’s it — the choice should be theirs)
  • ask yourself if you truly are an inclusive organization (which, FYI, does not mean DEI — see THE PROPHET‘s many rants on why this is not inclusivity as, simply put, opportunity does not imply outcome and DEI only measures outcome, which simply means it is being used in some countries as a new form of legal discrimination)

And if you can’t keep enough talent, you have to consider the top reasons people quit (as captured in a 2021 Pew Research Center survey):

  • low pay, see #1 reason for taking a new job
  • no opportunities for advancement
  • no respect
  • child care issues, see #2 reason for taking a new job
  • not enough work hour flexibility, see #2 reason for taking a new job
  • poor benefits, see #1 reason for taking a new job
  • wanted to relocate, see #3 reason for taking a new job
  • too many hours, see #2 reason for taking a new job
  • too few hours, see #4 reason for taking a new job
  • COVID-19 vaccine required, see #5 reason for taking a new job

Now, do you see “poor technology” anywhere on that list? If you do, get a new prescription and review the lists again. You don’t. That’s because, only a small fraction of people who leave a job will quote technology as one of the reasons (and the doctor would guarantee 99/100 it’s not the primary reason), and it’s probably less than the 14% quoted in the article. If you actually dig up the quote Lakeside Software research study, you see it canvassed 600 executives, IT leaders, and employees on the state of workplace technology and their digital experience. Not only is that a small sample group compared to the Gallup and Pew studies, but that’s not a homogenous sample group of employees (who were only 1/3 of the participants) — as executives and leaders (who probably don’t even have to use a computer) have entirely different reasons for taking and leaving jobs than the workforce! And even if the statistic was that high, you should be a heck of a lot more worried about why the other 6 employees are leaving than the 1 who decides he doesn’t like the tech he’s being forced to use, because you have much bigger problems than not having the absolute best tech!

Anyway, if you want more insights into Talent Recruitment, Retention, and Revolutionizing, dig into the SI archives.

You Admit You Might Be a Dumb Company. How do you avoid the fork in the road that leads to the Graveyard? Part 1

Good for you! Admitting you might be a dumb company is the most important thing to do on the yellow brick road to enlightenment.

So what do you do next? In short you:

  1. start by admitting to every mistake you are making and do something about it,
  2. look for opportunities to improve that are logical next steps, and
  3. never, ever forget the timeless basics.

Today, we’ll start with describing what you do when you identify, and admit to, one of the first five mistakes we chronicled in our re-introduction to our “dumb company” series and want to do something better. Next week, we’ll tackle the remainder of the mistakes before we move on to our eight-part series (each of which is worth much more than a piece of eight) on avoiding the graveyard if you are a dead company walking. After that, we’ll provide even more advice if you just want to be a smart company in two two-part series! In other words, SI has a lot of great helpful content lined up for you if you are a vendor that wants to successfully sail the choppy seas ahead (and not end up as another wreck on the ocean floor).

1) No More Perks

Unless you’re going crazy on perks, just leave them alone.

If a few are a bit crazy, reign them in to reasonable levels.

If they still eat up too much of your budget, find something else to cut. Start with the deadweight (and begin your search in the [micro] management suite). A useless or salary or two will go a long way to maintaining morale (and if you cut deadweight, morale will even lift).

2) No More Tech/SaaS

First, do a process time audit and figure out where your people are spending too much time on tasks that can be semi-automated to a significant extent.

Then, identify the appropriate solution to the problem and a set of potential SaaS tools to fill that solution affordably.

Then, Get SaaSy and do a SaaS audit, find the 33%+ overspend, cut it, and use that savings to get the SaaS your organization needs to be more productive and receive a return of at least $3 for every $1 spend on SaaS.

Finally, if your cloud costs are significant, Be Cloud Aware and do a cloud audit, tracking down what applications, or parts of your application, are chewing up the most CPU time. Then reign that in. Ongoing cloud costs add up faster than you realize!

3) NPD Can Wait (Sell What We Have)

Maybe heaven can wait, but hell waits for no man, and neither do the competition you don’t yet know about. No matter how good, or how bad, times are, your product must ALWAYS be improving. The minute you stop, the sales will stop as the customers will peg you as a dead company walking if you are not actively developing your product.

Segment all features into must, should and nice to have from a target customer perspective and make sure you are constantly working on the “must have” features, getting a decent number of the “should have” features that aren’t too time consuming to add into the plan, and prioritize any “nice to haves” that can swing a deal in your favour. If you have to slow down a bit because you can’t expand the team, that’s fine, just as long as you don’t stop.

Remember to keep dependencies in mind and structure development so that dependencies are always done first, to minimize release cycles.

4) No More Travel

Before you approve travel,

  1. first do an audit of all travel reasons the company has seen. Then,
  2. identify the direct and indirect ROI on past travel. Finally,
    • determine where in a marketing cycle travel actually results in actual, qualified leads
    • determine where in a sales cycle travel actually results in a selection or sale
    • determine which conferences/workshops/training events helped product management or developers

Then deny all travel that does not fall into one of those buckets.

Next, for travel that does, look at the cost vs. the projected return and how it compares to the most successful travel of the past. If a conference only results in 10 real leads, and it will cost 100K, but there’s another conference likely to result in 5 real leads that will only cost 25K, deny the first request and approve the second.

If $$$’s are tight, then restrict all travel to

  • small, focussed, cost-effective events that will generate actual leads or customer insights
  • on-sites likely to close the deal
  • low cost workshops where your product managers / developers will definitely improve their skills

5) Cut 10% Across the Board

Do a full budget review (keeping the dumb mistakes in mind) and cut the unnecessary expenses. They are MUCH higher than you think (because, when times are good, or you raise too much money, you don’t watch the small stuff and your unnecessary tail spend is just as bad as your clients).

Then, do a performance analysis (and blind peer review) of the teams across the department, especially the management teams, and cut the real deadweight.

Chances are, done right, there’s more than 10% that can be safely cut with no impact (whereas 10% across the board will damage morale to the point that the best talent might leave at a time they are the most critical).

Be sure to keep reading SI as Part 2 posts next week!

PROCUREMENT ARE NOT GUINEA PIGS!

Now, a lot of things grind my gears, but if you really want the doctor to fly into a rage, suggest, as this article did, that Procurement, the most critical function in the modern organization, and the one experiencing the greatest dearth of talent, should be used as a guinea pigs … and especially so for bullcr@p AI!

This is the kind of idiocy that, in olden times, would not only get you fired on the spot for suggesting it, but blacklisted by your employer and any other executive who hung out in the same private clubs. No one wants a reckless fool that could tank their business, earnings, and lifestyle … and that’s the last thing a rich, lazy, private club (and private jet) executive wants to happen. (And the last thing your team wants to happen as you put the blame on them and expect them to clean up a mess that the systems you imposed created.)

If you’re going to experiment with AI, especially if you’re just doing it so you won’t miss the bandwagon as it races by (because, as we’ve said before, it has no brakes and no steering if its the Gen-AI bandwagon), pick a function and a supporting task that is much (much) less critical where utter, abysmal failure won’t have any significant business impact … not a function where one mistake in even the most mundane of activities can halt your multi-million dollar production line for weeks (or months) and possibly bankrupt you!

Zombie Companies Exist Too!

Last week the one and only Dr. Tony Bridger, one of the world’s leading spend gurus, said that the correct term for “walking dead companies” is Zombie companies, and I had to correct him.

Historically, a person was walking dead when they had received a mortal wound, infection, poison, or radiation dose and it was just a matter of time before they died. But they weren’t dead yet, and there was always a chance (albeit not a good one) they could survive if they got medical treatment fast enough to stem the bleeding and repair enough of the damage, fight the infection with a miracle drug, get injected with the anti-venom, or get quickly decontaminated and receive enough red blood cell transfusions to have a fighting chance (although, admittedly, not a very good one).

Similarly, a walking dead company is a company that is on the path to insolvency (or acquisition on someone else’s terms if it’s lucky) because of the situation it is in, which is usually because of critical mistakes that were made in the past and still being made today. If such a company suddenly stopped making all identifiable mistakes, found a way to stem the bleeding (of cash), and mitigate some of those past mistakes, there’s still a chance it could survive. It might not be the company it wanted to be, but if it made it to break even, maybe it could find a new direction and a new chance to be great down the road.

In comparison, a zombie company is one that is already dead, and has been dead for years, but refuses to die, usually because of the stubbornness of one or two founders/leaders who believe if they make it just one more year, even though they refuse to do anything different from what they have been doing for years, the company will magically take off. They maintain a heretical, fervent belief that it just needs “more time”, just like the Gen-AI zealots believe it just needs “more cores”, and the American voters think they have a real choice (when, in a two party system, they don’t … or at least won’t until the Super PACs, which give money to both parties to ensure that whomever wins will support their core agenda, are made illegal and eliminated).

You can tell these companies because, in our space,

  • they have been around more than five years, and usually more than seven (before COVID and since the second last M&A frenzy in the late teens when money flowed freely)
  • they have less than 10 (FT) employees if they are primarily a point/module-based solution, and less than 20 (FT) employees
  • their customer count hasn’t increased significantly (i.e. has not increased by more than 10% to 20%) in at least 3 years, i.e. if they’ve managed to sign new customers, they’ve usually lost almost as many
  • they don’t do any marketing whatsoever beyond email campaigns and more often than not the copyright on their website is a year (or more) out of date
  • none of the major analyst firms or analysts have given them much attention in years

And, as any consultant, analyst, or partner who they attempted to engage or who tried to help them can tell you, the situation the company is in is unrecoverable or a non-starter.

(So while the doctor will be giving you

  • a two-part series on what you can do to avoid the graveyard if you admit to some of the dumb company mistakes and
  • an eight-part series on what you can do to avoid the graveyard if you are willing to admit you are making some of the dead company walking mistakes

he will not be doing any follow ups to this article.)

Why are they zombie companies? There are a lot of reasons the doctor can point to, and he’ll include a few examples in this article, but it all boils down to this:

  1. most of these companies are owned by one to three founders/partners who control the company and
  2. the refuse to admit that they need help, or if they admit they need help, they refuse to either do what is necessary, and often won’t even admit they need to do something different to get help

And since I know THE REVELATOR loves details, some examples include, but are definitely not limited to:

  • their messaging will be awful and their marketing strategy non-existent, and even if multiple people outright tell them that, including analysts and (potential) partners who want to help them, the founder/partner will either insist it’s just fine or that they need to keep it in house
  • they couldn’t sell a space heater to a freezing American stuck in Alaska, but won’t hire a full time sales person on salary because “a great salesperson should work only on commission and want to sell our product because it’s so great”, even though a sales person would need to sell a deal a month to make a decent salary on the commission on a 50K modular sale, and since it takes about a year to build a solid pipeline, that sales person is apparently supposed to starve for the first year (with zero stake in the company) … because of future potential
  • they admit they need help tweaking the product to be more appealing to a wider audience, but won’t pay for consulting because the budget is too tight — unless the consultant works on “referrals” … but that’s presales, not product, and not what the consultant they need is going to be any good at, so they don’t get any help … ever!
  • etc.

the doctor could go on, but he won’t, because there’s no point. At the end of the day, these zombie companies desperately need help, and even if they admit it in some capacity, they won’t get it because they don’t want “IP” to leave their “4 walls” (even though they have very little they need to protect as the core of most solutions that implement a core function is about 80% the same), or, usually don’t want to pay for it (because that would either require investment, a loan, and/or ownership dilution … and sales, which they are not getting and haven’t gotten in years, should pay for everything).

The founders/partners are the problem, they can’t be removed, and they’ll stubbornly keep sailing on the edge of the massive whirlpool that’s sure to swallow their ship to the bottom of the sea until they lose that one key customer (that accounts for a significant part of their revenues or referrals to replace the customers they keep losing) or one of the partners becomes unable to continue, at which time the helm will be unmanned and the whirlpool will win. It’s unfortunate for all involved, and it is even more unfortunate that, since they are private, you can’t do hostile takeovers of the ones with good tech that will soon be lost to time.

So that’s it. Zombie companies exist and they can’t be helped and you want to steer further from them then dead companies walking. At least in the case of a dead company walking, if that company admits it and charts a turn around course, it could end up being an okay bet, especially if they can reach profitability or are likely to get acquired intact by a new investor. But the only future for a zombie company, unable to acquire the brains it needs to survive, is to eventually shrivel up and fall apart and return to the dirt from which it came.

Don’t Fall for the Buzzwords!

In fact, as per our 10 words or phrases to ban from an RFP response last year (Part I and Part II), you should ban all buzzwords from not only your RFPs but from your communications with potential vendors. They should be counted as strikes against the vendor and the baseball rule applied (3 strikes and you’re out).

Even though you might be attracted to “social”, “green”, “(Gen-)AI” (which you shouldn’t be, since it’s been proven that all the emergent property claims are false), “autonomous”, “intake-to-“, “discovery”, “multiplier”, and “insights”, etc., you need to remember that the vendors know this and are using as many of these terms as possible to lure you to them and convince you they have the best solution, even if all they have are the best buzzwords.

After all, they know that you are under pressure by your consumers, colleagues, and CEO to be “social”, “green”, and “autonomous” and that, to do that, you need “insights” and “discovery” and that you are all getting swept up in the “intake-to” and “(Gen-)AI” hype-cycles and that you believe it will get you “multipliers” and “delightful” experiences.

So they are preying on your pressures, your desires, and your fears of missing the hype-cycle and being left-behind, even though these “hype” cycles are often literal — all “hype”, no “substance”. Social value is a buzzword, nothing more. Social value is not in applications, it is in awards and actions. The same with “green”. At the end of the day, all SaaS platforms are equally green (unless they use Gen-AI, because then they use ten time the computing resources to do a simple task), they all minimize the need for on-site hardware, but they all eat up cloud compute cycles. The green comes in the decisions you make with them.

Automation is important, but “autonomous” is only useful for tactical e-paper pushing, not for strategic decision making — good computational algorithms can compute odds (and make recommendations) based on the data presented, but it cannot make decisions, and the odds are only as good as the data. “Insights” are only achieved on good data … and if you don’t have that “good” data, you can be damn sure the vendor doesn’t. “Discovery” is always limited to data at your disposal or the vendor’s disposal. If you don’t have the supplier in your database and the vendor doesn’t have the supplier in its community database, there’s no way it’s going to be “discovered”. Also, “intake-to-procure” is useless if you don’t have the solution in place to actually “procure”. As we pointed out in our piece on marketplace madness, intake-to-orchestrate on its own is useless, and a real, modern procurement solution actually has “intake” built in. (So if yours doesn’t, maybe upgrade it to a better solution instead of paying six-figures a year for a view into your data that doesn’t actually add any value.)

Which brings us to the (Gen)-AI hype-cycle. It’s all hype, no substance. There are no valid uses for Gen-AI and even less uses than none in Procurement and it’s all a fallacy considering that even in a decade it won’t even have a 50/50 chance of being truly dependable at the expected rate of improvement. (And if a 200M investment into a new model culminated in the great insight that we should eat one rock a day, maybe it’s time to bury this failed offshoot of AI now before more Billions are wasted. After all, if those Billions were invested in the public school system, that would more than double the current national budget — think of how much better educated your children would be with that increase in funding. Despite the bullcr@p, the future lies in Human Intelligence (HI!), which needs to be nurtured, not abandoned.)

In other words, don’t get led astray by the buzzwords. Value comes from real products that solve real problems whose solutions provide real value to your organization. If the vendor can’t explain that in plain English, then you can be fairly certain the vendor doesn’t have anything truly valuable and you should move on.