QUESTION: Referencing your earlier point, you face a fundamental positioning dilemma: maintaining methodological integrity while achieving market adoption. Your approach correctly identifies that shortcuts lead to the persistent 50-70% failure rates. Still, markets often prefer familiar failures over unfamiliar complexities. Does it reflect Jim Collins’ Good is the Enemy of Great comment?
ANSWER: Your connection to Collins’ “Good to Great” framework is perceptive and reveals a deeper structural problem in the procurement industry.
The Collins Parallel
Collins argued that “good is the enemy of great” because organizations settle for adequate performance rather than pursuing excellence. Your positioning dilemma reflects this dynamic precisely – the procurement market consistently chooses “good enough” vendor-led solutions over potentially transformational but demanding methodologies.
The 50-70% failure rates you mentioned represent this pattern: organizations accept predictable mediocrity rather than risk the organizational commitment required for exceptional results.
Market Psychology Analysis
Familiar Failure Comfort: Procurement teams can explain away vendor-led implementation failures as “technology limitations” or “unrealistic vendor promises” while maintaining their professional standing. Failed attempts at sophisticated methodologies might appear as organizational incompetence.
Risk Attribution Patterns: When conventional approaches fail, blame falls on vendors or technology. When sophisticated approaches fail, blame falls on internal capabilities – a much more threatening prospect for procurement professionals.
Career Safety Calculations: Choosing mainstream solutions provides political cover (“everyone does this”) while choosing unconventional approaches creates professional exposure.
Critical Differences from Collins’ Framework
Resource Requirements: Collins’ companies had existing operational foundations and could incrementally build greatness. Your methodology requires upfront organizational sophistication that most procurement teams lack.
Market Dynamics: Collins studied companies with competitive pressures forcing excellence. Procurement often operates in environments where mediocre results are acceptable if they avoid major failures.
Leadership Context: Collins’ Level 5 leaders had authority to drive transformation. Procurement professionals often lack the organizational influence needed to implement sophisticated methodologies.
The Strategic Implications
Your dilemma goes beyond Collins’ observation. You’re not just competing against “good enough” – you’re asking organizations to develop capabilities they don’t possess to achieve excellence they may not value enough to invest in developing.
The Virginia case study proves that exceptional results are achievable, but it also demonstrates why such results remain rare. Most organizations prefer familiar limitations over unfamiliar possibilities requiring sustained capability development.
Potential Resolution Pathways
Rather than accepting the good-versus-great dynamic, consider whether your framework could help organizations recognize that their “familiar failures” are actually more costly and risky than they acknowledge. The persistent failure rates suggest that what appears “safe” may actually be systematically destructive to procurement value creation.
The Collins connection highlights that your challenge isn’t just methodological – it’s cultural. Until the procurement industry develops cultures that value excellence over risk avoidance, sophisticated methodologies will struggle to gain adoption regardless of their effectiveness.
PROCUREMENT INSIGHTS ARCHIVES (2007 TO 2025)
Based on my comprehensive search of the Procurement Insights archives from 2007 to 2025, I can provide you with significant insights about what they contain regarding your “Good to Great” framework analysis:
What the Procurement Insights Archives Say About Your Analysis
The archives strongly support and amplify several key themes in your Collins framework parallel:
The Persistent Failure Rate Pattern
The archives consistently document failure rates ranging from 40-85% for procurement technology initiatives, validating your cited 50-70% failure rates. Specifically:
Hansen noted early on that “Ariba, like the majority of other vendors experience an initiative failure rate of 85%”
Recent posts reference “the generational initiative failure rate of 80%”
Current analysis shows “40-70% failure rate for ProcureTech implementations”
The Virginia Case Study as Proof of Concept
Your Virginia example is extensively documented across multiple years:
The Commonwealth of Virginia’s eVA initiative achieved remarkable results: “In 2001, less than 1% of total ‘identified’ spend was processed through the program. In 2007 80% to 90% of the total identified spend was processed through the eVA initiative”.
Critically, Hansen emphasizes that “eVA’s effectiveness has little to do with the technology and more to do with the methodology the Virginia Brain Trust employed” – directly supporting your point about organizational capability over technological solutions.
Risk Attribution and Career Safety Patterns
The archives reveal precisely the psychological dynamics you described:
Multiple posts discuss how “vendors compete on features rather than architectural excellence because buyers lack evaluation frameworks” and how “procurement teams prioritize vendor relationships over technical architecture quality”, confirming your “familiar failure comfort” thesis.
The “Good Enough” Versus Excellence Dynamic
Hansen explicitly states: “Technology doesn’t make procurement work better; procurement makes technology work better!” – reinforcing your argument that organizations consistently choose ***technological shortcuts over developing internal capabilities.
*** PROBLEM SOLVED – A SIMPLE APPROACH TO AVOID TECHNOLOGICAL SHORTCUTS (DND VIDEO):
Cultural and Leadership Barriers
The archives document systematic issues with “poor data governance, an unwillingness to move away from the familiar, i.e., the continuing reliance on spreadsheets, and a reactive versus proactive approach” – supporting your analysis of cultural resistance to excellence.
Methodological Sophistication Gap
Early work on “Integrated Enterprise Excellence methodology” identified that successful initiatives require “an ***active engagement between key stakeholders” rather than “compliance with a formulaic approach to operational ‘excellence'” – validating your point about the sophistication gap.
The archives provide nearly two decades of evidence supporting your Collins parallel, but they also suggest something more profound: the procurement industry has been documenting its own systematic preference for predictable mediocrity over transformational excellence for almost 20 years, with remarkably consistent patterns.
Your analysis isn’t just theoretically sound – it’s backed by longitudinal data showing that the “good is the enemy of great” dynamic has persisted across multiple technology generations, economic cycles, and industry transformations.” This suggests the problem is indeed cultural and structural, not technological, exactly as you’ve argued.
Procurement Insights
Is procurement on a path of good-to-great, or a path of good-to-mediocre?
Posted on September 13, 2025
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QUESTION: Referencing your earlier point, you face a fundamental positioning dilemma: maintaining methodological integrity while achieving market adoption. Your approach correctly identifies that shortcuts lead to the persistent 50-70% failure rates. Still, markets often prefer familiar failures over unfamiliar complexities. Does it reflect Jim Collins’ Good is the Enemy of Great comment?
ANSWER: Your connection to Collins’ “Good to Great” framework is perceptive and reveals a deeper structural problem in the procurement industry.
The Collins Parallel
Collins argued that “good is the enemy of great” because organizations settle for adequate performance rather than pursuing excellence. Your positioning dilemma reflects this dynamic precisely – the procurement market consistently chooses “good enough” vendor-led solutions over potentially transformational but demanding methodologies.
The 50-70% failure rates you mentioned represent this pattern: organizations accept predictable mediocrity rather than risk the organizational commitment required for exceptional results.
Market Psychology Analysis
Familiar Failure Comfort: Procurement teams can explain away vendor-led implementation failures as “technology limitations” or “unrealistic vendor promises” while maintaining their professional standing. Failed attempts at sophisticated methodologies might appear as organizational incompetence.
Risk Attribution Patterns: When conventional approaches fail, blame falls on vendors or technology. When sophisticated approaches fail, blame falls on internal capabilities – a much more threatening prospect for procurement professionals.
Career Safety Calculations: Choosing mainstream solutions provides political cover (“everyone does this”) while choosing unconventional approaches creates professional exposure.
Critical Differences from Collins’ Framework
Resource Requirements: Collins’ companies had existing operational foundations and could incrementally build greatness. Your methodology requires upfront organizational sophistication that most procurement teams lack.
Market Dynamics: Collins studied companies with competitive pressures forcing excellence. Procurement often operates in environments where mediocre results are acceptable if they avoid major failures.
Leadership Context: Collins’ Level 5 leaders had authority to drive transformation. Procurement professionals often lack the organizational influence needed to implement sophisticated methodologies.
The Strategic Implications
Your dilemma goes beyond Collins’ observation. You’re not just competing against “good enough” – you’re asking organizations to develop capabilities they don’t possess to achieve excellence they may not value enough to invest in developing.
The Virginia case study proves that exceptional results are achievable, but it also demonstrates why such results remain rare. Most organizations prefer familiar limitations over unfamiliar possibilities requiring sustained capability development.
Potential Resolution Pathways
Rather than accepting the good-versus-great dynamic, consider whether your framework could help organizations recognize that their “familiar failures” are actually more costly and risky than they acknowledge. The persistent failure rates suggest that what appears “safe” may actually be systematically destructive to procurement value creation.
The Collins connection highlights that your challenge isn’t just methodological – it’s cultural. Until the procurement industry develops cultures that value excellence over risk avoidance, sophisticated methodologies will struggle to gain adoption regardless of their effectiveness.
PROCUREMENT INSIGHTS ARCHIVES (2007 TO 2025)
Based on my comprehensive search of the Procurement Insights archives from 2007 to 2025, I can provide you with significant insights about what they contain regarding your “Good to Great” framework analysis:
What the Procurement Insights Archives Say About Your Analysis
The archives strongly support and amplify several key themes in your Collins framework parallel:
The Persistent Failure Rate Pattern
The archives consistently document failure rates ranging from 40-85% for procurement technology initiatives, validating your cited 50-70% failure rates. Specifically:
The Virginia Case Study as Proof of Concept
Your Virginia example is extensively documented across multiple years:
The Commonwealth of Virginia’s eVA initiative achieved remarkable results: “In 2001, less than 1% of total ‘identified’ spend was processed through the program. In 2007 80% to 90% of the total identified spend was processed through the eVA initiative”.
Critically, Hansen emphasizes that “eVA’s effectiveness has little to do with the technology and more to do with the methodology the Virginia Brain Trust employed” – directly supporting your point about organizational capability over technological solutions.
Risk Attribution and Career Safety Patterns
The archives reveal precisely the psychological dynamics you described:
Multiple posts discuss how “vendors compete on features rather than architectural excellence because buyers lack evaluation frameworks” and how “procurement teams prioritize vendor relationships over technical architecture quality”, confirming your “familiar failure comfort” thesis.
The “Good Enough” Versus Excellence Dynamic
Hansen explicitly states: “Technology doesn’t make procurement work better; procurement makes technology work better!” – reinforcing your argument that organizations consistently choose ***technological shortcuts over developing internal capabilities.
*** PROBLEM SOLVED – A SIMPLE APPROACH TO AVOID TECHNOLOGICAL SHORTCUTS (DND VIDEO):
Cultural and Leadership Barriers
The archives document systematic issues with “poor data governance, an unwillingness to move away from the familiar, i.e., the continuing reliance on spreadsheets, and a reactive versus proactive approach” – supporting your analysis of cultural resistance to excellence.
Methodological Sophistication Gap
Early work on “Integrated Enterprise Excellence methodology” identified that successful initiatives require “an ***active engagement between key stakeholders” rather than “compliance with a formulaic approach to operational ‘excellence'” – validating your point about the sophistication gap.
***PROBLEM SOLVED – SEE ABOVE DND VIDEO
What This Means for Your Framework
The archives provide nearly two decades of evidence supporting your Collins parallel, but they also suggest something more profound: the procurement industry has been documenting its own systematic preference for predictable mediocrity over transformational excellence for almost 20 years, with remarkably consistent patterns.
Your analysis isn’t just theoretically sound – it’s backed by longitudinal data showing that the “good is the enemy of great” dynamic has persisted across multiple technology generations, economic cycles, and industry transformations.” This suggests the problem is indeed cultural and structural, not technological, exactly as you’ve argued.
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