Out of 15,000 hosts, Blog Talk Radio names Jon Hansen as one of their top 300 hosts

More to know about the Procurement Insights Blog;

• an independent industry study ranked Procurement Insights as one of The Top 25 Most Influential Supply Chain Management Blogs In The World
• Recognized as one of the Top 20 Global Thought Leaders on Procurement in 2019, 2021

• A two-time Ottawa Finalist for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award

When I started the Procurement Insights blog back in May 2007 I never had what you would say a grand plan. Seth Godin once said that he blogs because he can think of no other medium through which he can more freely write. In other words and like any writer the medium, and in particular blogging, is a means to an end in that it provides an outlet for one’s passion to express their thoughts and feelings. I could not agree more.

The fact that people read my posts still amazes me, let alone take the time to comment and be moved by my words. I am for this abundantly grateful. By the way, this is the same attitude I have relative to my listeners who faithfully tune in to the PI Window on the World radio show on Blog Talk Radio – which aired more than 900 episodes between 2009 and 2018.

Notwithstanding the above, there were, of course, practical reasons for becoming a blogger starting with the convenience of being able to write and publish anytime from anyplace. The fact that it enabled me to break the necessary yet confining shackles of working with a variety of editors from various publications was no small incentive. However, I still do write quite extensively for a number of publications around the world.

The key point is that blogging is a powerful tool through which any passionate writer can instantly respond to industry news without being mindful of a publication date or word count limitations (although I usually like to limit my posts to between 500 and 1,000 words). Think of the difference between writing for a magazine and blogging in terms of attempting to parallel park a bus as opposed to a sleek and much smaller sports car.

Of course, at the end of the day, the one rule that remains constant regardless of medium is that content is king. Merely having the ability to write does not necessarily mean that you mindlessly spew forth nonsensical phrases or irresponsibly wax polemic. You have to actually have something worthwhile to say and share. This means that you also have to do your homework.

For me, this latter point is the linchpin for a good blog post.

When you take your time to do your homework you are in essence paying the highest compliment to your readers. This demonstrates that you both respect and value their time and as a result want to make certain that you are not merely expressing an opinion but delivering tangible insight from a position of knowledge through which they will hopefully derive some benefit.

The fact that this blog’s readership has steadily grown over the past twelve and counting years would seem to indicate that I have succeeded more times than I have failed in this regard. But once again, the credit and thanks go to you the reader.

All this being said, and as part of what was the lead-up to my 1,000th blog post, here are the top 5 posts in terms of most reads from the Procurement Insights archives. It will be interesting to see what you think in terms of what was written back then and how it relates to our world today.

Top PI Blog Posts Countdown No. 1: Managing Supply Chain Risk (The Nokia and Ericsson Case Study)

Top PI Blog Posts Countdown No. 2: Double Marginalization and the Decentralized Supply Chain

Top PI Blog Posts Countdown No. 3: Is There a Difference Between Purchasing and Procurement? (A PI Q&A)

Top PI Blog Posts Countdown No. 4: Rosslyn Analytics Adaptive Intelligence Reflects Scientific Principles

Top PI Blog Posts Countdown No. 5: How Vulnerable Are We To A Cyberattack?

In the meantime, and I think that I have already said this but it is worth repeating . . . thank you for taking the time to read my blog. It has been a privilege to have you as a reader!

Adding To My 2007 Welcome In 2026

I wrote the welcome above in 2007, and I’ve left it exactly as it was. It is what I was thinking then, and rewriting it now to sound as though I knew where any of it would lead would be a small dishonesty. I didn’t have a plan. I still believe the best of what shows up here arrives the same way it did then — by doing the homework, and respecting the reader enough to check the work before publishing it.

What has changed since is not the belief. It is the evidence behind it.

When I started writing here in 2007, I was gathering client work, lectures, and articles that already reached back to a 1998 engagement with Canada’s Department of National Defence — work that moved on-time delivery from 51% to 97.3% in three months. The principle was never confined to that one engagement, and I said so in public early. In September 2007 I documented the Commonwealth of Virginia’s eVA as a model the rest of government should emulate — arguing that its success came from how Virginia aligned across its many lines of business, not from the software. Seven years later, when Virginia weighed retiring eVA in favour of an ERP procurement module, an independent Forrester evaluation found eVA the stronger option, and it stayed. eVA has run since 2001 and still saves the Commonwealth roughly $25 million a year. Invariant Physics™ has held true through every technology wave since — ERP, the internet, the cloud, and now AI agents. The blog didn’t create that record. It consolidated it in one place, contemporaneously, where it could be checked. Nineteen years on, that is what it still is — a dated, public record you can hold me to, not a highlight reel assembled after the fact.

Somewhere across those years, a pattern I’d been watching since 1998 hardened into something I was willing to state as a rule rather than a slogan: technologies advance endlessly, but the binding limit on what any of them can deliver has always stayed on the human side — the people, the processes, the trust, the operating logic. I call it Invariant Physics™. The readiness work upstream of any technology decision I call Phase 0™; the operating-logic question beneath it, Implementation Physics™. They aren’t new inventions. They’re names for what the 1998 work was already doing before I had language for it.

And the discipline governing all of it is the same one the 2007 welcome was reaching for when it talked about doing your homework — I’d just state it more plainly now: get it right rather than be right. A position is worth holding only until the evidence moves it, and holding it honestly means understanding the argument against your view better than its own advocates do — remaining at all times indifferent to the outcome and loyal to the evidence.

The record here stays independent: no vendor sponsorships, and none for over a decade. What you read is what I actually observed, when I observed it.

So the welcome above is the canvas — accurate the moment it was painted, and left untouched. This is the camcorder, still recording. Both are true. That is rather the whole point.

Truth Is Believing. Accuracy Is Knowing. Outcome Is Proof.™

By the way, and if you haven’t already read enough of my writing by way of the blog, my book – which was co-written with Buyers Meeting Point’s Kelly Barner, is available through Amazon.

NOTE: Effective August 31st, 2015, Procurement Insights and Procurement Insights European Union Edition will no longer offer sponsorships to service providers. Read more about it through the following post It is time for procurement to come of age.

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