Category Archives: rants

Why So Few Tweets from the C-Suite?

A recent HBR blog post asked “why so few tweets from the C-suite”. Apparently the author, a “reputation strategist” at a public relations consultancy (no surprises here!), believes that all modern CEO should have a presence online and that the best way to accomplish this is to use modern social platforms, among which Twitter (again, PR person) is supposedly included.

Well, there’s an easy answer to this question, and since I’m such a nice guy, I’m going to give it to her:

Because, contrary to popular opinion, C-suite executives are not a bunch of twits.

Generally speaking, you do not get promoted to the C-suite if you’re an idiot. And most modern executives, who know that Twitter will make a twit out of you by causing you to lose basic writing skills, understand that they need every brain cell they have to survive in today’s modern economy. So while there is an argument for them to be blogging and communicating more with the public using modern tools, there’s never a good reason to use tools like Twitter, and thank whatever deity you believe in that some people still have the good sense to know this!

Have You Been Aribaed: The Harbinger of Getting Paid

Today’s guest post is from Richard Adin, founder of Freelance Editorial Services and blogmaster of An American Editor. It originally appeared on An American Editor on September 23, 2010 and is reprinted with kind permission.

Have you been aribaed (that’s ariba + ed to somewhat simulate the verbing of a company name)? I have and I must admit, I don’t like it.

It’s the modern megacorporation’s way of further shafting (squeezing mercilessly) the little person who really can’t fight back. It isn’t the battle between near-equals or almost-near-equals or even fantasy-almost-near-equals, but the battle of multiple giants against an ant.

Okay, I hear you asking, “so what’s the problem?” The problem is this: freelance editors are generally 1-person small businesses. They do not make million-dollar grosses, do not file SEC reports quarterly, and do not worry about being delisted on the stock exchanges. Instead, they worry about keeping expenses down, getting enough business to earn a living that is at least equivalent to what they could earn working at the local convenience store, and getting those who hire them to pay them the agreed-to amount on time. In other words, we are part of that cadre that both Republicans and Democrats seemingly want to protect when they speak of small business but consistently fail to protect because we don’t fork over enough cash to them.

What is Ariba? Ariba is a megacorporation1 that serves as an intermediary between suppliers and clients for invoicing and payment. I assume that the reason for a company to sign on with Ariba is so that it can eventually eliminate its own accounts payable department, saving the costs of writing checks, verifying invoices, and, of course, all the costs associated with having human beings working in these departments; I don’t know this for certain.

So far, so good — right? Well, setting aside the idea that if American companies continue to forcibly retire low-level workers so they can increase the perks to very-high-level executives there soon will be only a handful of people able to afford to buy the company’s products because the vast majority of people will have no disposable income (and let’s face it, if you manufacture a book, how many copies of a title is the company CEO likely to buy), there is nothing particularly wrong with delegating to a third party bill paying.

Except when you — the supplier of labor or goods — are aribaed, because when you are aribaed, you have to pay Ariba a percentage of your invoice in order to get paid. Imagine this. MegaMonolith Corporation (MM) hires you to edit a book and because of competition and outsourcing to packagers, in order to compete you have had to set your price at the same level as it was in 1995.

So you do the job with great skill and care, working long days and weekends to get the job done in time to meet MM’s compressed schedule — and getting no additional monies for working more than 8 hours in a day or on weekends — and submit your invoice for payment. Previously, your invoice went directly to MM, the client.

But out of the blue MM gets the bright idea to use Ariba. Now you get your chance to be aribaed. In order to edit books for MM, you have to get a purchase order (just like before, so no big deal) but now you have to submit your invoice through Ariba, who won’t process your invoice unless there is a matching purchase order. On the surface it looks great until you get your check and discover that you’ve aribaed — Ariba charges you a percentage of your invoice for sending you the money you are owed. And, if you don’t join Ariba, process your invoices through Ariba, and pay Ariba’s fee, you can no longer sell your services to MM. Welcome to the group of people who have been aribaed!

On wonders if MM needs to replace a thousand computers is it likely that Dell or IBM will voluntarily pay this fee? My guess is not, but they have the power that us freelancers don’t and offer goods that are relatively unique, which we don’t. In the end, it is the small fry like us who will pay MM’s operational costs or be barred from doing business with MM.

Ariba’s pitch is that it is a place of networking. Other potential customers will find you in its database and send you business. And my great-great-great-great-grandmother will be elected president of the United States right after her resurrection. Do they really think we are so naive as to believe that the people who make the decision to hire a freelance editor are searching Ariba’s database?

Unfortunately, just as many publishers have forsaken quality for quarterly returns, so they will squeeze the little person because they can’t squeeze the IBMs and Microsofts of the world. They will squeeze where they can, which means the workers in the trenches. And aribaing freelancers is just one more way to do so. It is a natural next step to the outsourcing of editorial services to packagers that began in earnest in the late 1990s as a way to squeeze editorial pricing.

Are you ready to be aribaed? If not, get prepared, because it is coming.

Thanks, Richard!

1 As per a recent post by Debbie Wilson on the Gartner blogs, it is a megacorporation with a market cap of 1.73 Billion.

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An Analyst Finally Gets BI Right!

After reading report after report after report from analyst firm after analyst firm after analyst firm for the last decade or so on how more BI is the answer (it’s usually not), I was very pleasantly surprised by this recent post by Lora Cecere (ex-AMR) of the Altimeter Group over on Supply Chain Shaman on why you should free the data to answer the questions that you don’t know to ask.

The first paragraph captures the situation perfectly:

It happens all the time. IT says to line of business leaders, “Tell me what you need for Business Intelligence (BI), and I will go find the right technologies“. The issue is that we don’t know, and we will not know soon. We only know that applications are changing and that the data is growing exponentially. The answer to the question of: “What is the right data architecture for demand-driven value networks?” is “It is evolving. We don’t know“.

This means that no fixed BI or OLAP solution is ever going to solve your problem! I don’t care if it can handle and/or is designed for geo-spatial data, sentiment analysis, loyalty programs, POS, or CRM. It won’t work. That’s why, as I keep stressing, you need a real data analysis solution that can cube, dimension, map, slice, dice, augment, expand, re-map, re-cube, and start again on data sets of millions of transactions in real time on your high end laptop or workstation. Until each of your analysts has this type of solution on their desktops, they’ll never get the intelligence they’re looking for.

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Why SI is Multimedia Free

It seems that the current craze in the blogsphere is to do podcasts and multimedia videos (posted on YouTube). Just about everyone’s doing it, so why isn’t SI?

Well, first of all, as my regular readers know, I’m not a lemming. I didn’t follow the spacers when they went la-la over MySpace. I didn’t follow the facers when they want stupid over Facebook. And I didn’t follow the twits when they went tweeters over Twitter. I’m not a mindless pitch-fork wielding zombie farmer who simply follows the loudest guy with the biggest burning stick. I’m capable of free thought and free expression and willing to make up my own damn mind.

But the real reason SI is multi-media free is this: I like being literate, and I assume that because you keep coming back, you do too. It’s bad enough that Twitter will make a twit out of you, demonstrated by the fact that it’s causing 30% of students to fail English competency, but if we move entirely to multimedia, it won’t be long before the majority of the population is unable to read at a high school level and becomes functionally illiterate. And that’s a fate I don’t want to share in. So I’ll stick to the written word. We’ll all be smarter for it.

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Headline From the Land of D’OH: Bypassing Proven Supply Sources Invites Unacceptable Risk

Really? I did not know that! Tell me more!

Don’t we all know this by now? Needless to say I was a little disappointed when I saw this headline in Industry Week on “bypassing proven supply sources invites unacceptable risk”, one of my favourite publications in recent times as they usually avoid the obvious diatribe I expect from the WSJ (and used to expect from the now deceased Purchasing) and focus on the core issue, such as how to maintain quality and proven sources of supply in tough times.

There wasn’t a single sentence in the article that I don’t think we all know by now. We know cheap often translates into poor quality, lack of service, and all too often as of late, recalls. We know that production line downtime costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. We know that moor Procurement needs to meet regularly with Engineering and they have to work together to maintain the necessary budget.

What we need is advice on how Procurement can stave off the incentive to “go for the lowest cost no matter what” when the top line design and production managers know that the associated costs of such a decision far outweigh the savings. We need some advice on how Purchasing can qualify the total cost and risk associated with a decision and show that “the 10% cheaper solution will in fact cost the company 10% more”. We need a discussion of cost modelling, optimization, and simulation that can be used to demonstrate the true total costs.

And when health and safety is on the line, we need the reminder that even the simplest of parts can spell disaster. Remember, it was a single O-ring that resulted in the Challenger disaster. That’s right, a single vulcanized rubber part brought down a Billion dollar piece of equipment. We can’t overlook quality, but until the cost of poor quality is quantified, uneducated business leaders will continue to do so. So let’s teach our buyers about cost modelling and optimization every chance we get. It’s the only way we’re truly going to end this view of relentless cost cutting as business as usual.