Category Archives: Friday Rant
Rant: Singapore’s Taxicab Problem and Lack of Modern Payment Systems
Gleaming, polished buildings, well maintained landscaping, even slick subway stations with swipe cards that are a pleasure to use—the last one clearly not a Ventra design. You can find food from all over the world and see high-end fashion both in store display windows and paraded about on smartly dressed people everywhere. Singapore is a cleaner version of New York, with thinner people in a Tokyo designed setting with a bit of Hawaiian greenery incorporated. But expect to be frustrated if you need a cab between the hours of four and six in the afternoon.
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Total Cost of Independent Schooling: Indexed Tuition, Limited Diversity, and Mental Health
To say that the quality of U.S. public schools varies tremendously is the understatement of our times. But most families with school age children – given that the country's median annual household income (with two wage earners and two children) is about $50,000 – are more or less locked in to sending kids to their local public school. And the pure economic argument that we can all vote with our feet and relocate to a neighborhood where the schools are above average -- as is the cost of housing and real estate taxes that largely fund the schools -- is specious and unrealistic.
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Irrational Exuberance and Tech Valuations in B2B: Tradeshift, Tungsten, and Blur Group
I’ve come to believe that from an investment perspective we’re in the early to middle stages of a tech bubble in the procurement, supply chain, and B2B sector. This is a topic from a research perspective we’ve covered extensively on Spend Matters and Plus/PRO already (and been a part of behind the scenes, helping analyze and structure a number of deals in recent years). Today, I offer my shoot-from-the-hip market take on the valuations and potential of Tradeshift, Tungsten and Blur Group – three companies caught up in the high valuation time in which we find ourselves, albeit for different reasons.
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Friday Rant: Olympics Drama and Allegiance for Hire
Hyun-soo Ahn was one of South Korea's most decorated short-track speed skaters (five World Championships and three gold medals at the 2006 Olympics), so why did he change his name to Viktor Ahn and now skates for Russia? What the author of this NY Times article failed to understand is that sports federations in South Korea are like mini-mobs, if not worse. There have been allegations of abuse of power, misappropriation of funds, physical mistreatment of athletes, etc.
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Facebook & WhatsApp, The M&A Bubble, and Valuing B2B Companies With New Metrics
Looking at Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, I’m getting a sneaking feeling like it’s 1999 all over again. As with the last Internet bubble, consumer-centric tech companies with stratospheric valuations are leading the charge in buying smaller firms with, well, stratospheric valuations. And the metrics being used to gauge acquisition value – the number of users and user growth rates – seem eerily similar to non-financial valuation metrics from last time around (eyeballs, anyone?). That is, when Mary Meeker and Henry Blodgett ushered in an era where discounted cash flow analysis was taught only to business school students and had no place in the bubble M&A world.
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Please Consider Appropriateness When Writing for the Procurement Audience!
Procurement must become more centralised. No, procurement must be more in decentralised with power passed to budget holders. Procurement people should be specialist negotiators and commercial strategists. No, procurement people must become deep experts in contract law and displace the lawyers. Clearly, these ideas can't all be right all the time in all organisations.
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Happy Valentine’s Day – Feeling Stuck Between Scylla and Charybdis?
For the sake of this post, Scylla is the multi-headed ERP/SI monster and Charybdis the gluttonous maw of the financial maelstrom otherwise known as your IT department. Said tongue-in-cheek of course! You never seem to get solutions that fully get the job done, and your ERP provider (combined with their systems integrator brother-in-arms) has so many options that that you don’t even know what to get. And your own IT department typically isn’t the right partner to speak with about your needs either.
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Rant: Customer Service on Domestic Flights Leave Much to be Desired
Greetings from the SFO Red Carpet Club. There were days, pre-marriage and definitely pre-kids, when I enjoyed flying, whether for work or for leisure. And the Star Alliance network, led by United Airlines (now United Continental Holdings) provided the widest reach. Fast forward a few years (after accumulating 200K+ air miles every year and joining the million miler program, not to mention marriage and kids), I now fly only when it’s necessary. So when I logged almost 50,000 miles in the last 60 days (no, I am not trying to reach two million miles), it was like learning a new trick all over again.
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“Ariba is Now a Product, Not a Company”
I have spent three of the past four weeks in Europe meeting with various procurement organizational leaders, technology vendors, financial services companies, consultants, business partners, and fellow industry observers. It’s been a whirlwind to say the least. One of the topics on many people’s minds appears to be the future direction of Ariba inside SAP. It would appear a number of the predictions we published following the acquisition are starting to come true, including some internal shifts in thinking regarding the future of the network (which we’re excited to hear). But there was one statement in particular I heard someone say that captured the evolution of the acquisition.
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Rant: Buying Snow and Ice in Atlanta
I narrowly escaped getting stuck at the Atlanta airport, when I managed to get on a noon flight to Chicago via Detroit on Tuesday. My wife on the other hand kept working at her office along the northern perimeter in Atlanta, and when she finally decided to head home in the afternoon, she was caught in the snow along with tens (hundreds?) of thousands of other commuters. What normally is a 40-60 minute commute turned into an 8 or 9 hour crawl covering a mere 20 miles. Around 1 am she pulled over at a nearby hotel and spent the night in the lobby, which was filled with fellow stranded commuters.
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Strategic Sourcing Meets the Hermès and Charvet Set: A Corporate Travel Vote Against US Airlines
Back in 2013, I met with a senior procurement executive for a global bank after we had both had a couple of drinks. I always find talking to procurement heads of banks to be a fun endeavor (especially on the investment banking side – since they must represent spend requisitioned by the biggest prima donnas in the business world with their own set of John Lobb, Andersen and Sheppard, Hermes and Turnbull & Asser preferences). And all the better once they’re sufficiently lubricated to result in more great war stories.
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Cost of Climate Change: Coca-Cola, the Coal Industry, and Conservative Economists Have At It
The debate over climate change, and -- as some still argue -- whether it is even occurring, are becoming moot as an increase in droughts, floods, and wildly unseasonal temperature extremes interrupt food and water supply chains and increase commodity and financial risk. Or, as the old adage goes; if you want someone to stand up and take notice, hit 'em in the wallet. According to an article in today’s New York Times, Coca-Cola has become more focused on global warming than its economic bottom line.
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