Category Archives: rants

One Hundred Years Ago Today

The Patent Frenzy began when Francis Holton filed the millionth patent in the United States Patent Office for a tubeless vehicle tire. From 1790 (when the first patent was filed on July 31) to 1911, only one million patents were filed. In the last hundred years, almost fourteen million patents were filed, with over four million in the last ten years alone. Crazy! No wonder the software patent pirates [still] plunder away!

I wish they would follow Napolean Bonaparte’s example and retreat to the South Atlantic to live in Exile. Saint Helena still exists and I certainly won’t stop them from recreating the voyage Napolean embarked on 196 years ago today!

Perfect Procurement Processes Will Not Save the Public Sector

There’s lots of hmming and hawing on both sides of the Atlantic about how the Public Sector has to reduce spend to help get deficits under control and how it needs better procurement processes to achieve this goal. Why, I don’t know, because even perfect procurement processes won’t save the public sector. I could write a treatise, but until the following fundamental problems are solved, there’s no point.

  • Past Performance Does Not Affect Current Awards
    This is so ridiculous its absurd. No private company in their right mind would say “you just screwed up this 500 Million system overhaul, but here, please bid on this other 500 Million system overhaul”. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. (At least not if they wanted to stay in business.)
  • X% Must Go to Minority/Domestic/Preferred Suppliers
    And while we’re at it, let’s just tag on 10% for the United Way. After all, they claim their overhead is now under 15%. (FYI: The overhead of a best-in-class, private, Supply Management Organization is a fraction of that.) Supply Management is about the best buy. Period. Diversity/Domestic/Preferred should only come into account when all other factors are equal or if they bring value that outweighs additional costs.
  • Salary is based on pay scales out of touch with reality
    Supply Management success requires top talent. And if you’re only going to offer 50% of the going market rate, you’re not going to attract anyone who’s any good. While there should be pay scales to insure fairness, they should be adjusted annually based on regional averages and existing employees making less than the minimum when the pay scale is adjusted should automatically be adjusted to the minimum before the annual raise and/or bonus is calculated.

So, What Might a Good Job Advertisement Look Like?

A good advertisement is very job specific, but as per yesterday’s post on how you have to start with a good advertisement if you want to attract talent because carbon-copy blah-blah-blah indicates you have a talent management problem. In this post, we’ll give you a sample job advertisement that is much better than the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah referenced in last Friday’s post. The advertisement is in italics. For a comparison, we include the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah in code font. While this advertisement is not perfect in any aspect, it does illustrate some of the concepts outlined in yesterday’s post.


Senior Technology Sourcing Manager


Here’s an exciting opportunity for an experienced sourcing manager or CTO in the technology domain to join ABC Bank in its downtown Manhattan (New York) location in a permanent role. The successful candidate will enjoy a base salary of up to 200K, which will be augmented by an uncapped performance-based bonus (using our corporate cost reduction and avoidance formula), a first-rate health plan, 401K matching, gym membership, and an annual training allowance.

Here's a superb opportunity for an experienced sourcing manager within the hardware and software domains looking to join a top tier investment bank. This is a permanent position based out of New York City that will pay a base salary of 150K plus a competitive bonus and benefits package.


The Senior Technology Sourcing manager will be responsible for all hardware and software buys and leases, corporate data centers, application hosting, and shared sourcing initiatives. In addition to negotiating favourable awards that benefit the company and the stakeholders, the successful candidate will be responsible for supplier relationship management and development initiatives. Our company is planning to transition from multiple discrete data centers that host its different divisions to a small number of data centers that will support our entire global operation in a shared infrastructure setup. One of your first tasks will be to manage the sourcing of our service provider and the multi-year, eight-figure outsourcing contract that will result. This is a challenge worthy of a superstar.


In this role you will manage Hardware and Shared Infrastructure Software sourcing initiatives, support the post contract supplier management of critical suppliers, and liaise with the legal department to ensure favourable commercial terms. In addition you will constantly interact with senior management to relay critical information about vendor relations and contracts. This is an excellent opportunity for a qualified candidate who has had strategic sourcing experience looking to manage a high visibility, multi-million dollar project for a leading investment bank.


This is a Senior position and we expect that successful candidates will have 10 years of combined experience, with at least 3 in a technology sourcing or CTO role, and either experience in, or considerable exposure or education in finance and financial services. A Bachelor’s degree is preferred, but candidates with equivalent experience and an ISM CPSM or equivalent certification will be considered.

In order to be considered for this position, you must have worked as a hardware and software sourcing manager on a global scale within the financial services industry for several years.


ABC Bank is top-tier international investment bank that is in the Fortune 500 in the US and the Global 1000. ABC encourages a culture of open communication, teamwork, and innovation and believes its results, and not hours, location, or overtime that counts. Employees can work flex hours and telecommute when needed, and take advantage of leading processes and tools to get results. Each sourcing manager is given access to a complete sourcing suite that includes an analysis engine, an optimization engine, and an end-to-end negotiation and contract management engine to make the sourcing process as smooth and efficient as possible.

A top tier investment bank.

Complete information on the role, our company, and our culture can be found on our corporate website, www.abcbank.com. The corporate job ID is 647862, and the complete description can be used by searching for this job ID in the careers portal. Applications can be submitted on our site, e-mailed to career-647862@abcbank.com, or faxed to 866 555 5555. If you have any questions, you can e-mail questions-647862@abcbank.com, speak to one of our HR professionals in an on-line chat between 9 and 5 ET, Monday to Friday, by way of the career chat feature in the careers portal, or call 888 555 5555. If no one is available to take your call, leave a voice mail and we will get back to you within 1 business day. All applications will be acknowledged when received, and all applicants who apply by the closing date of August 31, 2011 will be notified of whether or not they were selected for an interview by September 15, 2011. Those candidates selected for an interview will be contacted within one week of notification to set up a time. ABC Bank appreciates your interest and hopes we can exceed your expectations.

E-mail careers@recruiter.com

Unlike the carbon-copy blah-blah-blah, this advertisement is specific, focussed on the role, educationally and experientially defined, clear on corporate culture and benefit information, and complete in contact information. It could use some work, but considering the doctor banged it out in 30 minutes, it’s not bad. And it makes a point. It’s not hard to write a good job advertisement if you want to. So if you really want talent, you’ll do it.

Your Browser Matters

While using Internet Explorer will not make you dumb, if you are using it, you probably are. That’s what a recent study by AptiQuant, that a gave more than 100,000 participants an IQ test while monitoring which browser they used to take the test, found. The results, nicely summarized in this CNN article that asks if Internet Explorer Users [are] Dumb, found that users of IE6 scored the lowest on the tests, with a score of just over 80, while users of Opera (the doctor‘s preferred browser by the way, using it since, believe it or not, 1997 when Opera 3.0 was released) scored the highest at well over 120. In other words, IE Users were at the bottom of the “dullness” range while Opera Users have “very superior intelligence” or, for the more technical, in order to include IE users, you have to go two standard deviations from the mean down, and in order to include Opera users, you have to go two standard deviations from the mean up.

Cheap shot at IE users? Oh yeah. Do they deserve it? Probably. There’s no excuse to be using IE, the most non-standards compliant browser on the market, when Firefox, Chrome, and even Safari are leagues ahead and cross-platform. Consider the recent HTML5 Browser Scorecard. IE9 Beta supports a mere 96 HTML 5 features, while Safari 5, Chrome 8, and Firefox 5 support over 200 features. So drop IE. Even if it doesn’t raise your IQ (as the doctor understands that correlation is not causation), at least no one will think you’re dumb.

Efficiency is Never Bad. It’s the Focus on Cost-Cutting that Kills You!

Glancing through my notes, I came across this piece in S&DC Executive from the early spring that asked if “too much efficiency [can] be a bad thing”. I bookmarked it because articles like this really grind my gears. We have enough problems without respected publications publishing idiotic articles, such as this, that try to answer difficult problems with findings from studies that identify correlation, not causation. (And as Pinky and the Brain explained in their brilliant lesson in statistics, correlation and causation are not the same thing. Simply put, correlation measures the relationship betwee effects, which have underlying causes.)

And while I fully believe the results from the in-depth study that asked what drives financial performance and analyzed the financial performance of publicly traded U.S. manufacturing firms from 1991 to 2006, as reported in Volume 29: Issue 3 of the Journal of Operations Management, I reject the editorial staff’s claim that the results present empirical evidence to support the view [that too much efficiency is a bad thing]. Efficiency is never a bad thing. It’s the principles guiding the application of the efficiency that is the problem.

As the article states, if there is no slack in the supply chain when a disruption occurs, then this will cause operational problems that will result in a negative financial impact. But the decision to go all-out with a Just-In-Time (JIT) philosophy is not an efficiency decision, it’s a cost-cutting decision. Less stock means less inventory and carrying costs. So some firms, in their effort to save every penny, go ultra-lean and then run into serious problem when a demand surge or supply disruption hits.

Efficiency corresponds to the production, inventory, and logistical processes used to manufacture, store, and ship the goods. It’s streamlining the process to eliminate time and resource waste, not cutting production quotas to dangerous levels. It’s minimizing packaging and storage space requirements by maximizing package integrity and space utilization, not eliminating safety stock. And it’s optimizing the distribution network for quick and affordable shipping, not altering lot sizes to fill an existing truck or lane to save a few pennies on shipping costs (when there are dollars to be saved from a network redesign).

Efficiency is never bad. Only ill-conceived supply chain design decisions and overly ambitious cost cutting is bad. And anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand what efficiency means.