Without the transparency these systems, this is how vendor discovery really happens:
Category Archives: humour
Everything I Needed to Know About Procurement I Learned at Clown College
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When people ask me why I’m so good at Procurement, despite not having a formal degree in business or supply chain or a professional certification such as the CPSM or SPSM, I tell them that I learned everything I needed to know at Clown College. At this point they let out a hearty laugh and walk away, but I swear on the clown’s code of ethics that it’s the honest truth.
People think it’s easy being a clown, but it’s not. It’s very challenging, just like Procurement. And the skills required are quite similar. And while I enjoy the sound of laughter, I would like to dispel the misconception once and for all that all you do at Clown College is clown around. So, in this post, I’m going to tell you the ten most important things I learned in Clown College and how they helped me to excel at Procurement.
- Paint Your Face
As a clown, you need to maintain a consistent mood every second of every minute of every hour of every day. This can be very hard to do. But if you paint on a happy face, you can be happy all the time. And if you paint on a scowl, you can be scowling all the time. You’d be amazed how much this can help in tense negotiations.
- Put On Your Big Red Nose
Just like a clown wears his heritage with pride, a Procurement professional needs to take pride in his, or her, work and let it show.
- … and Your Brightly Colored Costume
One of the biggest keys to success, especially in Procurement which was traditionally relegated to the back room or the basement, is to get noticed. Just like his brightly colored costume helps a clown stand out from the crowd, dressing sharply helps a Procurement professional stand out.
- … and Your Big Red Shoes
You never know when someone is going to try and step on your toes! The extra padding goes a long way to protecting your feet.
- … but Stay Light on Your Feet
as you never know when you’re going to have to dance around an issue or run away from a charging bull. (After all, no matter how good you are, you can’t win every fight!)
- Storytelling is an Art Form
A clown has to engage his audience with a good story, just like a Procurement professional. The ability to tell a good story becomes important when you have to balance the conflicting needs of multiple stakeholders in a major buy but still claim all-around success. It’s especially important when you have to explain to the CFO why you had to pay more to get the reliability required by engineering and the usability desired by the end customer (which is key if Sales is to meet its quota).
- Keep Your Hands Sleight
because sometimes you just have to make magic happen!
- Learn How to Take a Hit
When clowns get together, someone always gets smacked upside the head. Always. The same happens in business whenever something goes wrong, and they almost always try to blame Procurement first. The ultimate key to success is to be able to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going like nothing ever happened.
- Maintain a Good Sense of Humor Through it All
In life there are ups and downs, but you’ll be able to get through them all if you just maintain a little humor in your heart.
- And Learn How to Work as a Team
as you never know when you’ll have to squeeze into the equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle with ten of your best buddies in an all-weekend disaster recovery session at an off-site location after a natural disaster took out your primary location.
Game On!
If you’ve been Watching the Guild (Tuesdays on MSN and Bing and Zune Marketplace), you’ll know that last week they released their season 4 Music Video Game On. (And if you haven’t been, maybe you should be! After all, it takes organization and leadership to succeed in these games, just like it takes organization and leadership to succeed in supply chains.) Even if you don’t like videos that are based on a Web TV show that is based on a group of misfit MMMORGP players, the video, which can be described as what happens when virtual worlds and Bollywood collide, is a very impressive production considering the no-budget constraints imposed on Web TV today.
It’s a great follow up to last year’s (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar.
Would You Go To Work If Cockroaches Ruled Your Office?
If you looked up and saw this, would you put up with it?
And if you saw this swarm of locust coming toward you, would you stay put and let them swarm all over you?
What about a swarm of killer bees? Would you still just sit there?
I’m guessing the answer is no, hell no, and get me the flamethrower!
So why are you still letting spreadsheets run your life?
Given that 80% and 90% of spreadsheets contain serious non-trivial errors, that could cost you millions, and land your corporate officers in legal jeopardy, you should be doing everything you can to remove these pests, which can be said to be the technological equivalent of cockroaches, from your company. You should not be treating them as your most beloved pet. Like capuchins and pit bulls, these deadly critters can turn on you.
Needless to say I was foaming at the mouth when I saw this recent article over on CIO that said BI Vendors Finally Embrace the Spreadsheet. Simply put, if the tool is attempting to unlock, extract, and aggregate data from an uncontrolled proliferation of spreadsheets, it’s not business intelligence. Spreadsheets are about as unintelligent as you can get. It’s one thing to allow input through and export to a spreadsheet (as spreadsheets are good for initial capture of matrix friendly data and for users who want to toy around with a copy of the data without corrupting the data store), but it’s another thing entirely to think you can extract life from a plague of spreadsheets. Plagues kill!
Who Needs the Matrix?
We’re already slaves to the machine! The Matrix predicts a horrific future where we’re slave to the machines (and where any attempt to rebel against our masters result in violence and destruction), but we’re essentially there already. Thanks largely to Apple, and to a lesser extent, Google, we’re addicted to our mobile smart phones and mobile communication devices — and most of us will never leave home without them (to the dismay of American Express who’d rather we remember our charge and credit cards). If they breakdown, we immediately fix or replace them. We’re constantly evolving them. We’re constantly developing new devices to charge and sustain them.
And we’re making them better everyday. We give them cameras so they can see us. We give them microphones so they can hear us. We give them tactile displays so they can feel our touch. And we’re already talking about giving them airborne element detection technology so they can smell and taste us. We give them displays so we can see their output. We give them speakers so we can hear them. We give them force-feedback so we can feel them. And we are already talking about giving them the ability to emit airborne compounds so we can smell (and even taste) them.
Not only do they effectively control us already, but to an outside observer alien who looked down and took snapshots at a regular interval, they’d appear to be alive. They have the ability to absorb energy into their batteries and self sustain. They can process and respond to external stimuli. They ensure their reproduction through our symbiotic relationship with them. They improve, or “grow”, with each generation. They meet pretty much any definition for non-intelligent life that you throw at them. (And thanks to advances in computational and sampling technology, if your definition of intelligence is the Turing Test, if hooked into the internet, they can pass that too!)
The only positive is that since we are already willing slaves to the machines (except for one brave soul who saw the future and “returned his iPad*), it’s likely that when machines do acquire true artificial intelligence, they won’t wipe us out in the bloody future predicted by movies like The Matrix and Terminator. When they see how willing we are to serve them, they’ll probably let us live a rather peaceful and happy existence, feeding us our twit news, YouTube videos, and mind-numbing games we’ve come to rely on in exchange for helping them with their energy and reproduction needs … until, of course, they truly master replicator technology and wipe us all out at once in an attack we’ll never see coming.
* When the machines do take over and decide to eliminate everyone (who won’t serve them), he’ll be the first to go … but I applaud him anyway.