As a Procurement Professional, your primary focus is on reducing spend, because that’s the greatest contribution to the bottom line that an organization can make. When one dollar of savings equals ten dollars of profit, it’s pretty easy to focus on squeezing every penny you can out of that supplier. But you can go too far. For example, if you push the supplier’s margin to minimally sustainable levels, and raw material costs rise, either the supplier is going to go belly up, or sacrifice on quality (with cheaper materials or processes).

If the supplier sacrifices on quality, and you don’t realize it until after the fact when customers start returning goods, your organization is going to have trouble giving the customer an excellent customer service experience, which is key not only to customer retention, but to profit. I was reminded of this when I came across this recent article in CRM buyer on the value of excellent online customer service. The article notes how a recent survey has revealed that customers are willing to pay a 9.7% premium for good customer service (and a 10.7% premium for customer service online). In other words, the only thing most organizations have to do to increase revenue by 10% is provide quality service around a quality product!

So keep this in mind the next time you’re trying to reduce an already good deal by an additional percentage point. If that’s the difference between good quality, and a product that is defective 10% of the time, then that 1% savings is costing you 10% revenue, which is not a good deal at all.

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He’d shut down Twitter. Period.

At the very least, he’d make permanent account termination a single click for people who are tired of contentless tweets that make them dumber than a pothead and cause them to fail basic English competency tests. After all, it’s not like anyone hears when a twit speaks in the twittersphere. And 10 Billion Tweets is just too much.

Twitter is NOT an information network. Information, by definition, must convey meaning. Billions of random thoughts, tiny URLS that disappear almost as fast as they are generated, and content-free marketing messages do not contain meaning. And you can’t increase the signal-to-noise ratio without a signal! Zero is zero is zero. It doesn’t matter how you look at it: upside down, right-side up, inverted … it’s still zero! Sounds to me like the CEO has been spending a little too much time on his own “network”! And if you don’t believe me, check out this article on techradar, where he’s quoted.

Check out this recent article by PCWorld on how your “MySpace User Data [is] For Sale”. This includes any activity or information that is attached to an account, specifically blog posts, location, photos, reviews, and status updates-among others. And I don’t care what wording they use. They can claim it’s just free access to publicly available real-time data, but if they’re making it possible for anyone to get access to data you thought would only be seen by your closest friends [because you didn’t read to the end of the usage agreement which says they own your data], then they’re selling your data, plain and simple.

So don’t be surprised if that blog post extolling the virtues of the new laptop you bought winds up on the manufacturer’s site; if your name, age, and entertainment preferences put you on top of the local satellite provider’s “call until they buy” list; or if that hot beach picture ends up in an ad promoting the services of, say, a site like Adult Friend Finder.