Spend Matters » William Busch

Audiophilia: Finding the Best Amplification to Match Your Taste and Budget

William Busch — Fri, 03 May 2013 19:26:41 +0000

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 [...]

Audiophilia – Optimizing Spend on Turntables (Part 2)

William Busch — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:19:47 +0000

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 [...]

Audiophilia – Optimizing Spend on Turntables

William Busch — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 20:26:15 +0000

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 [...]

The Contracting Dark Side of Procurement Outsourcing & Supplier Management: Alienating Strategic Suppliers

William Busch — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:39:32 +0000

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 [...]

Vehicle History Reports Can Lead to Irretrievable Loss to Sellers

William Busch — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:17:45 +0000

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 [...]

New York’s Art Auctioneers Take Bids From Thin Air

William Busch — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:53:10 +0000

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 [...]

Why Does Exorbitant Healthcare Spending Not Equal Good Health In the U.S.?

William Busch — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:01:00 +0000

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 [...]

Friday Rant: The Medium Isn't The Only Message — Challenges of Organizational Growth

William Busch — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:01:00 +0000

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 [...]

Friday Rant: The Present Value Cost of Risk Demands Far More Attention at the Executive Level

William Busch — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:12:00 +0000

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 [...]

Friday Rant: Federal & State Funding for Rehabbing Vacation Homes Post Sandy — Let's Get Real

William Busch — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:11:00 +0000

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 [...]