Spend Analysis Cartoon: Adapt or Die

The fine gentlemen and ladies at our Chicago neighbor Spend Radar, recently shared with me an early cartoon that's part of a forthcoming campaign they plan to unleash on the procurement masses. When I saw it, I asked if I could put it up on Spend Matters first and they obliged (see below). I've often thought there was a great opportunity in procurement's often dank basement corner office to leverage sketches and cartoons as a medium to express ideas, entertain others and influence outcomes (not to mention to make fun of our own situation inside many companies). The Spend Radar campaign does all three of the former in my book, by poking some fun at the rigidity of so many first generation spend analysis approaches. It's a bit of an inside joke, but there's some truth behind it as well -- as is typical with most good political and business cartoons.

I'd like to leave the invitation open to both providers (sponsors and non-sponsors alike) and practitioners to submit cartoons and sketches in the future. Even if what you send is part of a marketing campaign, if you think it will elicit a chuckle and it's not just a low competitive blow, we'll print it. I wanted to do this ourselves and wrote as much in a column last year, but I realized that pulling together cartoons required a completely different skill-set than we had available to us in the office. So I'm hoping that a community-generated approach to visuals such as this will help liven things up from time-to-time.

While you're at it, on a slightly more serious note, I'd also like to open up a request to Spend Matters readers to submit both the best and the worst procurement technology architecture and overview slides you've come across as well. I've come across some real stinkers in my day and surprisingly few which do a good job at distilling technical complexity to a general procurement business audience.

- Jason Busch