Vendor Management- Superpower

vendor management is the MOST important skill of the AI world in the past, the super valuable work thing was being able to recruit, manage, and grow people. it was all about talent, talent, talent. recruiting and managing is super hard to do and there are thousands of books on it. there are MBA courses about it. there is even a whole organization function (HR) that is supposed to help with this (though HR usually hurts more than help). But “people” is much less valuable today because most firms will have way fewer employees in the future. almost every company, except for the startup, is at peak employee count today. The revenue per employee will go up 3-10 times in the next decade. in the future, the most valuable work thing will be to select and manage vendors — including software, APIs, tech contractors, AIs, and more. there are ZERO good books (or even blog posts on this) on selecting and managing vendors — so if you can do this well, you will have a big advantage. most people are really bad at selecting and managing vendors. Like grade F bad. So even if you get yourself to a grade C, you will be in the top 10%. the best people are the crazy founders that run $100 million companies by themselves … but you cannot hire those people to help. so get to Grade C and you will be king. “Becoming a Grade C vendor manager is like being the tallest kid in vendor kindergarten. Congrats, you now run the playground.” “People used to write memoirs about leading teams. You’ll be writing Substack posts titled ‘How I Fired 3 SaaS Tools in One Day.’” “Revenue per employee is going up — because half your ‘employees’ are just Chrome tabs and Zapier zaps now.” | 12 comments on LinkedIn