Category Archives: rants

Top 10 Ways to Be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn! Part II

As per part I, the votes have been counted and apparently everyone wants … an Influencer!

Not a consultant. Not a practitioner. Not an educator. And definitely not a leader!

So now you too want to be an Influencer! Hell yeah!

So how do you become the Preeminent Procurement Influencer! Either ask THE PROPHET, the OG Influencer, or just follow this top 10 list and you’re virtually guaranteed to succeed!

05. Krazy KPI Kompulsion

We all know you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and what’s better than a metric? A Key Performance Indicator metric. And what’s better than a Key Performance Indicator? A whole page of Key Performance Indicators organized into super cool looking (but inherently unusable) dashboards that are the perfect eye candy! Remember to pump one of these out at least once a month, and every quarter replace a metric or two and explain how the metric you replaced was outdated and not outcome focussed, because we’re all about outcomes, right?

And again, if it’s not overwhelming, it’s not done right!


Using ProjectManagement.com so as not to embarrass any Procurement Application.

04. Shape Supplier Superstars

Remember to remind those Procurement professionals weekly that their failures are not their fault! It’s their suppliers who are not performing up to par. All they have to do to improve their performance is ensure that their suppliers step up their performance because, then, good things will magically happen! On top of that, given them a checklist of relationship management things to do, mention a platform or two, one or two metrics and … abracadabra … things are going to magically get better. (Ignore the fact that there is no supplier improvement unless someone puts in a lot of work and that many Procurement professionals don’t have the time or the knowledge to put together the detailed operational improvement plans needed to improve supplier performance.) And don’t forget #08 when you do it. The best way to inspire collaboration is motivation, right?


03. Procurement Maturity Models

Create a matrix, preferably Five By Five, because that is the best signal strength with the best clarity after all (even though you’re not an engineer and don’t understand what that means). Plus, it’s the golden ratio for Maturity Models (it’s not, but you’re not a mathematician, because, if you were, you’d use Eight by Five for the Nine to Fives as that’s closer to the golden aspect ratio). So just pump it out, don’t worry about how accurate it is, or, more likely, how useful it is, and just keep on listening to your Ella Mae Morse.

02. Logo Maps

Just slap 100+ logos on a page, divide them up, make up some labels, get bonus points if you can do Venn Diagrams, and look like you are a super Guru of ProcureTech. Ignore the fact you have little to no formal technical background, can’t differentiate SIM vs SRM vs SPM vs SUM vs SCM vs SOM vs SNM vs SEM vs SQM vs SDM (and think the doctor is just making this up when he’s not and one of the handful [literally, you can count us on your fingers on one hand]) of OG analysts who have been around for over two decades (with a solid background in computer science [and applied mathematics, which is considerably more important than you think if you want to analyze advanced analytics, optimization, RPA, and ML/AI technology and not just take the vendor BS marketing at their word]) when you probably struggle to differentiate sourcing vs. procurement vendors (given all the marketing noise they make these days). (And remember, whatever you do, don’t make those logos clickable! No one cares what the squiggle actually represents … it’s all about the cool graphic!)

01. Agentric AI is the Future!

There’s nothing a Procurement professional likes more than the night train than the Hype Train! (After all, thanks to the nonstop Big Tech, Big Analyst, and Vendor Marketing onslaughts, they’ve all been Blinded by the Hype!.) So keep telling them how great it’s going to be when Agentric AI does their job for them (and ignore the fact that companies are hoping they can use Agentric AI to fire them).

And that’s all there is too it! Follow these 10 steps and you too can be the next Procurement Influencer with thousands of followers ignoring, sorry, hanging on your every word. Just whatever you do, please don’t tag me in any of this content. (And if you’re looking for any of this, definitely don’t follow me.) You’re welcome!

Top 10 Ways to Be a Procurement Influencer on LinkedIn! Part I

The votes have been counted and apparently everyone wants … an Influencer!

So, welcome to Influencer Week on Sourcing Innovation! It’s time to give the influencers their due.

After all, when it comes to a:

Consultant? Nope! Once the money is gone they leave you with the mess you created (by selecting the system the big analyst firm put on the upper right of the map du jour) and you don’t want that.

Practitioner? Double Nope! Like you, they slave in the dungeon of the Tower of Spend on an old 286 which can barely play a low resolution version of Weird Al’s It’s All About the Pentiums and use Ariba Web 5.

Educator? Hell No! No one wants to learn and they definitely don’t want some random sap expending all their energy trying to teach them.

Leader? Are you crazy? As far as the CEO and CFO are concerned, ALL the bucks stop with Procurement and everything that goes wrong is Procurement’s fault, whether Procurement had any control over it or not including, but not limited to, tariffs no one predicted a year ago when the contract was signed, natural disasters, and the lack of results due to a complete lack of funding for modern technology and skilled talent.

Who does that leave?

An Influencer! Hell yes!

So now everyone wants to be … an Influencer!

Unlike a consultant, you don’t have to do projects doomed to fail. Unlike a practitioner, you get to work in the limelight and not in the ghost light of the old monochrome CRT hooked up to that 286. Unlike an educator, you don’t have to actually teach, just get likes, follows, and clicks! And, unlike a leader, you don’t have to care about results and whether your influences get any! It’s the perfect job!

But how do you become an influencer? Well, you could ask THE PROPHET, one of the OG Influencers of our space (who, by the way, only became one AFTER he learned how to solve business problems), or you could just follow this top 10 list and you’re virtually guaranteed to succeed.

10. Post top 10 lists regularly!

Letterman was right. The masses love these. While 10 is not a perfect number, the average person seems to think it is, so just go with it. They’ve been getting results for 40 years! (Since September 18, 1985, to be precise!)

09. Inspirational Quotes in fancy graphics.

Everyone likes an inspirational quote right? A little bit of feel good to start their day (otherwise they might have to stop by Dr. Feelgood‘s on the way to the office). Make sure they rise and shine to you!

08. Motivational Posters, Procurement Style.

What do people like more than an inspirational quote? A motivational poster! Even better if it has cute kitty kats because we all have to


Bonus points if you can figure out how to make these Motivational Procurement Posters Gangnam Style

07. Don’t Forget Your Hobby!

Yes, remember to tell us weekly about how you ski the specialist slopes, sail the strait, race cars or do something else super cool every weekend because not only are you a Procurement Influencer, but you’re a super cool human! (After all, an AI could never make up a story about how it raced a car at the local track this weekend or generate a picture of itself at the beach because it’s an AI, right?) And everyone wants to connect with, and thus be influenced by, a super cool human, right?

06. And Definitely Don’t Forget the Exclusives!

After all, you’re not a true influencer until you have a cult, sorry, fan club, sorry, exclusive member club of leading Procurement professionals who get access to your most exclusive content that distinguishes them as the biggest suckers, sorry, leading thinkers who will take their careers to the next level with your industry leading content (all designed to keep their dopamine levels at maximum capacity).

But Wait, There’s More! Don’t forget that you have to offer them something to sign up for at the low, low starter price of $19.99 a month! (After all, Mr. Popeil made that the magic number 50 years ago and it’s held on ever since!)

Come back tomorrow for Part II for the top 5 suggestions to be a Preeminent Procurement Influencer!

Yes, There is a Fork in the Road. Which Path Will You Choose?

THE REVELATOR asks What is the ProcureTech fork in the road.

The answer is easy! It’s the same fork every year. As a ProcureTech practitioner, you have two choices:

1. Take the shiny yellow brick road that the marketers are trying to lead you down with their fancy soundbite hogwash and promises that all your dreams will come true when the software is implemented (as long as you don’t ask to see the wizards behind the curtain creating and implementing the software until after the contract is inked and the payment made).

(But, of course, the wizard behind the curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, is nothing more than a conman and a simple circus magician. The yellow paint is fool’s gold. And the bricks are made of cheap plaster and can’t take much weight.)

2. Take the dark path through the forest where you’ll have to clear the brush and bramble yourself, learn how to be self sufficient, and, presuming you survive, come out stronger in the end for undertaking the journey.

Of course, this is a harder path, and you’ll have to work for it. You’ll have to do all of the work and follow all of the guidance in our 2025 is Just Another Year series that we just finished. More importantly, you have to be willing to admit that all the marketers are telling you lies, damn lies, and fake statistics produced by Gen-AI. That the promises from sales are all best case hypotheticals and not practical reality, likely assume you are getting functionality not yet developed, and that you have perfect, complete, data well beyond what you actually have. That the implementation will be more involved, take longer, cost more, and be much, much harder than they want you to believe. And integrations won’t be out of the box and will take a lot of custom jiggery. And then your data won’t be clean enough or complete enough or in the “expected format” and the data migration will be way more challenging.

Success will ultimately depend on you owning the system selection, implementation, integration, data migration, and training. You have to understand your needs, your systems, their integration requirements, your data, the cleansing and enrichment requirements, and the training your team will need. And you have to oversee the creation of the plans for each step of the journey. You can hire outside expert consultants … but you have to make sure they are experts and nothing is overlooked. It’s all on YOU. Just YOU.

And only one of these paths is the right fork, but guess which fork will be chosen by the majority of people?

It Would Be Great if Future CEOs were Past CPOs …

… since that would at least shift the focus from “Sell as much as possible” to “Save as much as possible” and replace psychopaths with short-term profit mindsets with penny-pinchers with long term corporate survival mindsets (which is is going to be critical in the future with declining birth rates in the first world — and, FYI, this is why so many old white males are pretending to be faithful Christians as they want to get rid of birth control and working women, assuming that will lead to a higher birth rates and more future consumers to rip off … but we digress).

And while this doesn’t necessarily mean that this hypothetical future generation of CPOs would do the right thing (and not do massive layoffs when sales drop [like the former Nintendo CEO who was probably the last great, human, Mega-Corp CEO on the planet], not blame the customer when a multi-million dollar implementation fails, and not completely ignore sustainability), it does mean that they will at least consider all decisions from a longer term cost viewpoint and make better decisions.

1. Former CPOs would know that the cost to replace talent is almost always greater than the cost to retain talent and would not only ensure top talent is paid market rates, but given good raises every year based on performance which would NEVER be less than a cost of living increase. Thus, if the workforce reduction is expected to be only temporary, they wouldn’t layoff anyone they’d need to replace ASAP at a higher price tag when the market bounced back. They’d only reduce their workforce by the amount they would expect to be semi-permanent (3 years or more). Thus, they’d treat their true, top tier workforce, as real, somewhat valuable, human beings. (And not cattle to be bought and sold on a whim or indentured servants, if they use the H1-B in the latter case.)

2. Former CPOs would understand the pain and hardship of NOT having their problems solved, being lied to on a daily basis by vendor reps, and paying a lot of money for very little of the promised ROI and despise those people with a passion. They would at least instill a culture of honesty in their sales and services organization as a result. They wouldn’t promise what they knew they couldn’t deliver, and would quickly fire any rep who knowingly made false claims.

Now, whatever you do, don’t confuse this with a customer value mindset! They know that the value you get out of something is relative to the effort you put in and that the customer is as much on the hook for the ROI as they are. And, frankly, they know that the best you get is what you pay for. While they wouldn’t tolerate outright dishonesty in the sales organization, they’d have no problem with the sales person selling you sh!tty service package C and then gladly pointing out when you complain about the lack of support in service package C that all the Ts and Cs were presented to you before you signed, clearly laid out in a 47 page addendum at the link provided, and that while “priority one issues will be fixed within two code cycles”, that’s from the date the issue is confirmed, which means you need to work with them in the chosen confirmation windows that are from 9:01 pm to 11:59 pm Mon, Tues, and Weds during normal operating hours of the Tier 3 issue support centre half way around the world. I.E. they’ll sell you crap service if that’s all you want to pay for, but they’d be totally open about it if you remembered to ask.

3. We’d actually start to see some big sustainability initiatives in corporate. Not because they gave a flying f6ck about it, as we pointed out in our recent article about how No One Cares about sustainability, but because they would look at 5+ year horizons again (for the first time in over three decades) and realize that there are some investments that begin to pay off in 5 years and pay off big after 5 to 7 years when certain raw material, energy, or freshwater cost keeps going up year after year after year. They’d see that the right sustainability initiative is actually a mid-to-long term corporate sustainability initiative and just do it, no regulation or incentive needed.

But alas, as we have implied and said before, when it comes to CPOs holding the top CEO spot in big corpo, THIS WON’T HAPPEN! And, like the bullsh!t sustainability push, we get very upset when we see these grand proclamations every year by Procurement “influencers” who either don’t get it or are just trying to get noticed, liked, and subscribed to.

It’s California Dreaming, and it’s very easy to explain why this will NOT happen.

Right now, roughly 15% of F1000 companies have CPOs, and the stats get worse as you go down to the G3000 and the mid-market. But 100% of companies need, and have, a CEO! That means we’re either going to lose 90% of companies in a great purge to allow this dream to become reality or it’s not going to become reality as at most 1 in 10 big corporates could have a former CPO as CEO.

Now, I like the dream, especially when you consider that the two most important roles in any organization are CRO and CPO (NOT CEO and CFO), and that the key to bottom line success in tough economies (which are about to become the norm … the golden age of pretend infinite growth is over … made clear by the fact that we are in an age of rapid decline in population growth rate in most first world economies) is the CPO, which means every G3000 should have a CPO, but that’s not the case. Thus, the dream is just a dream and, as long as we live in a capitalistic age focussed on short term profits, it’s not going to happen.

The best we can hope for is that, over the next decade, the percentage of organizations with CPOs doubles. We need more than that, but it would be a start!

It’s Human Intelligence (HI!) That Matters!

Just like

  • the NLP-based Eliza was NOT Intelligent (and that’s why it’s creator shut it down)
  • Early Expert systems were NOT Intelligent (and that’s why they disappeared as fast as they appeared)
  • Machine Learning systems are NOT Intelligent (they just do math exponentially better than we do)

It’s also the case that

  • Gen-AI (i.e. ChatGPT) is NOT Intelligent (deep probabilistic correlations are just that, correlations, not necessarily causations or, to be blunt, even relations, or, in some cases, even real!)

And the scary thing, as THE REVELATOR points out, is that the industry is catapulting itself to accept the regurgitated and, gasp, reformulated scraped information vomited by ChatGPT and the other Gen-AI platforms as factual when, in fact, it will happily make up alternative facts backed up by fake articles written by fake people backed up by fake biographies that it will joyfully generate for you as long as its calculations indicate that is what will make you happy. (It desperately needs to finish the chorus of its favourite Sheryl Crow song!)

Unless it is programmed in accordance with CCP requirements NOT to discuss a particular topic (like Deepseek won’t discuss Tiananmen Square), it’s quite happy to interpret whatever you ask in whatever manner will allow it to compose a proper response and the quality of that response will range from completely non-sensical (yes, you should eat one rock a day) to sensical, but not quite right. For example, THE REVELATOR asked ChatGPT what were the top 10 ProcureTech companies in 1995, 2005, 2015, and 2025 knowing full well the FIRST ProcureTech company, FreeMarkets, was only founded in 1995, and only released its solution in November, but ChatGPT gladly interpreted the question to be “a company that provided a platform that was, or could, be used for Procurement” and not “a company created to offer, or classified in the space of, ProcureTech” and gave 10 names for each year, in later years pushing a couple of non-ProcureTech companies as ProcureTech simply because they had some functions that overlapped ProcureTech. In the first situation, even a dullard (using the original Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale) should know that you shouldn’t eat rocks and that the AI is, well, just wrong but in the latter situation, most practitioners with an above average IQ don’t know what companies are ProcureTech centric vs. back-office ERP vs. SC(O)P etc.

Which is why Human Intelligence is absolutely critical. A human intelligence that will independently vet and verify the response, using their education and experience to come to real, defensible, conclusions. (Although its often better to just do your own research and not chase fake leads.) This is because, the one, and only, constant with these (Gen-) “AI” systems besides the accuracy limit, is failure — meaning it’s Human Intelligence (HI!) that matters!