Author Archives: William Busch
Audiophilia: Finding the Best Amplification to Match Your Taste and Budget
Imagine having the opportunity to sit in an acoustically perfect concert hall, listen to a piece of music performed while it’s recorded on the finest recording equipment, and then have the recorded playback sound nearly identical. This is what audiophile obsession is all about. It’s also a process that the famous speaker/designer Jon Dahlquist employed back in the 70′s, but we’ll save that discussion for another post. Having discussed vinyl playback in my two previous posts (here and here) – generally agreed to be the finest reproduction media – let’s also leave a discussion of CD players for another day [...]
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Audiophilia – Optimizing Spend on Turntables (Part 2)
I was delightfully surprised by the enthusiastic and informed comments to Part 1 of this post’s theme a few weeks back. Because this is indeed a “… a fun range for procurement types because it mandates a focus on value and forces fiscal discipline,” as one reply mentioned, let’s look take a look at optimizing the medium – the vinyl records themselves. They are exquisitely primitive by design. In fact, I came across an article in an ethnography publication many years ago where an anthropologist described an a-ha moment in which he postulated that ancient pottery, thrown and spun on [...]
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Audiophilia – Optimizing Spend on Turntables
It’s always interesting to discover shared passion with co-workers – the hobby kind. Many of us at Spend Matters are vinyl record snobs, and we somehow evolved a side board email thread about turntables last week. If you’re thinking “You mean the ones where you actually have to stop a record and turn it over to hear the other side?” – yes. In the course of our dialogue, I was accused of possessing “a wealth of knowledge about all this” and encouraged to write a few diversionary Friday posts. So here goes. If you’re not an audiophile and have grown [...]
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The Contracting Dark Side of Procurement Outsourcing & Supplier Management: Alienating Strategic Suppliers
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. When I hear undertones of it in conversation I bristle. But alas, as Joseph Heller said in Catch 22, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t after you.” Or in this case, after your time. Could it be that one of the most attractive incentives to outsource and pay others to minimize your supplier risk is that the process sucks time like a black hole consumes matter? Here at Spend Matters we wax incessantly about how vital supplier management is to organizational sustenance, growth and success and how outsourcing parts of the process [...]
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Vehicle History Reports Can Lead to Irretrievable Loss to Sellers
Two weeks ago, my wife’s mint condition 12-year-old car was t-boned by a Boy Scout (replete with uniform, hat and kerchief) in a mall parking lot. True to his oath of ethics, he was insured and accepted full accountability for causing the accident. Most importantly, no one was physically injured. All of which makes this a curiously simple case study of insured auto loss – until we consider the impact of used vehicle history reporting upon used car value. Let’s say you’re in the market for a used car and you find one of interest. For about 25 bucks you [...]
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New York’s Art Auctioneers Take Bids From Thin Air
While we’re all familiar with reverse auctions, it’s unlikely that many Spend Matters readers have ever participated in the rarefied air that surrounds the New York art auction season. And while we might all like to have the massive quantity of discretionary cash needed to bid, it appears that the air from which bids are taken in this high stakes commodity market is more than a bit polluted. This week’s New York Times published an extensive exposé revealing some rather shady practices that underlie Manhattan’s art market theater. Imagine participating in an auction where there’s an opening bid and the auctioneer [...]
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Why Does Exorbitant Healthcare Spending Not Equal Good Health In the U.S.?
The International Herald Tribune reported last summer that “Combined public and private spending on health care in the U.S. came to $8,233 per person in 2010, more than twice as much as relatively rich European countries such as France, Sweden and Britain that provide universal health care.” Yet a study, commissioned by the National Institutes of Health carried out by experts appointed by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine — released last week according to the New York Times — found “on average, Americans experience higher rates of disease and injury and die sooner than people in [...]
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Friday Rant: The Medium Isn't The Only Message — Challenges of Organizational Growth
Most of you know that Spend Matters launched years ago with an entrepreneurial vision and passion to fill a sorely needed void of expert commentary, analysis and insight into one of the most ubiquitous business functions on the planet. What you may not have been aware of is that that Jason was not only it’s visionary, but it’s sole employee back then. He worked, interviewed and wrote voraciously and voluminously — and still does of course — but as an organization of one. Our growth has been exponential since then and, over the past few years, dramatically enhanced by a [...]
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Friday Rant: The Present Value Cost of Risk Demands Far More Attention at the Executive Level
Back in the early 80′s when I was at Wharton Grad and also a full time print shop manager, paper warehouse manager and buyer of copiers and peripherals, desktop computers with DOS operating systems were just beginning to replace card punching machines at Penn. It was a hands on era when professors of Computer Science still supervised campus wide hard wired networks to mainframes and the academic discipline of risk management resided in the Insurance Department populated by a hand full of professors near retirement. Much has changed since then, but not nearly enough. A recent article on the Harvard [...]
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Friday Rant: Federal & State Funding for Rehabbing Vacation Homes Post Sandy — Let's Get Real
From early childhood, I’ve luxuriated in spending summers at a seaside family vacation home in Southern New Jersey built by my great-grandfather in the 1940′s. And for the past 70 years, my extended family has counted their blessings when after every storm, “The House” has been relatively unscathed — that is, until Hurricane Sandy. We have always known that “a big one” would hit some day and now one has. My sister and I are currently matriarch and patriarch of this grand family legacy and our seaside vacation community has changed dramatically over the years from a sparsely built fishing [...]
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Friday Rant: The Fiscal Cliff, U.S. Tax Code & Class Warfare
Indeed, spend matters immensely and must be cut to reduce the U.S. deficit. But as uncertainty grows around exactly how the U.S. executive branch and legislature will soften the scheduled fall off the fiscal cliff at year’s end, a few statistics to enable some out-of-the-box thinking warrant attention. It takes the CCH Standard Tax Reporter, “the most comprehensive and current federal income tax law authority in the industry,” 73,608 pages to fully document the U.S. tax code — the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), enacted by Congress in Title 26 of the United States Code (26 U.S.C.) — as it stands [...]
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Friday Rant: Where's The Gasoline Post Sandy?
Answers to this critical supply chain debacle question are all over the map in today’s press from claims that refineries pre-emptively shut down as Sandy advanced, to mention of damage at refineries preventing them from coming back on line. But the real answer appears to be lack of electricity to pump refined fuel from stocked storage tanks and POS retail service stations. CNBC reports “The problem is not gasoline supplies, but the ability to distribute it, especially from the critical terminal area around Linden, N.J., which lost power and was hit by storm surge. An estimated 75 percent or more [...]
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Friday Rant: When 2% of the Flying Public Diminish Value for All &c
I was on two fully booked domestic flights this week. Not unusual as Fall biz travel is in full bloom. But something new stood out in the pre-flight SOP: a “please do not remove items from the overhead compartments that do not belong to you” admonishment. Wow — the narcissists among us have found new ways to pierce the thin veil of civilization. That flyers continue to push the envelope with oversized carry-ons is disruptive enough — now we have a contingent of self important, self obsessed fellow passengers who attempt to have someone’s else bag checked on-board rather than [...]
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Friday Rant: Can CEO Compensation Be Accurately Benchmarked – And Who Wants the Job Anyway?
CEO compensation is not an incidental line item contributor on most corporate proxy statements when it comes to declaring the cost of executive compensation. And while most boards of directors have a fairly intuitive sense of what they need to hire and pay to retain executive talent among their COOs, CMOs, CFOs, CPOs etc., sufficient CEO compensation can be far more elusive and difficult to justify to shareholders. The managerial skills required of CEOs clearly demand a very high level of competency in finance, marketing and operations but in reality, their primary organizational acumen must lie with their ability to [...]
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Friday Rant: Investing in the Best & Brightest to Nurture Corporate Loyalty — Back to the Future
Ask any professional business person over 50 what’s changed most in their work arena over the past 20 years and you’re very likely to hear a bluesy tale about how no one stays in one place for long and that corporate and employee loyalty have become oxymoronic. I’m in the age group to which I refer and believe that these supposed lost values have impacted corporations to a far greater degree than the careers of those they’ve failed to retain. Sure, there was a time when the majority of the business work force spent their entire lives with one, or [...]
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The Lost Holiday
The U.S. national holiday of Labor Day is celebrated today for about the 119th time — but who’s counting? If we look at Labor Day anthropomorphically, it has a number of unenviable problems. As the bookend that brackets the un-official end of summer, Labor Day has a crummy job and few friends. Its distant relative, Memorial Day, has it made by contrast as the gateway to Summer vacations while carrying the solemn duty of honoring the nation’s fallen protectors of freedom. Surely everyone loves a holiday if for no other reason than it usually means a day off from work. [...]
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