The Weekly Pull #009 (Rewired Edition)

Even Greece wasn’t enough to recharge

Author

Ana Zvijinschi
September 08, 2025

I skipped last week’s edition. Not because I didn’t want to write, but because I simply didn’t have the energy to think of yet another angle while on vacation.

I was in Greece, doing all the right things — swimming, eating well, slowing down. And for the first time in months, I actually relaxed.

But here’s the truth: a week of sun and sea doesn’t undo years of burning the candle at both ends. Procurement has a way of draining you quietly — endless renewals, constant risk policing, fighting for savings that are never “enough.”

At some point, you realize recovery takes more than a week off. It takes rethinking how we work.

Because the truth is, procurement doesn’t just burn people out — it starves strategy of oxygen.

When Strategy Suffocates

Procurement is built on paradox:

  • Companies say they want strategic value, but keep us chained to short-term savings.

  • They want risk avoidance, but starve us of the time to actually map it properly.

  • They say innovation, but give us no breathing room to think beyond the next quarter.

Burnout here doesn’t come with flashing alarms. It creeps in as “functioning.”

You show up, deliver, execute the checklist — but the spark is gone.

And that’s the real cost: when you’re too tired to think strategically, no supplier playbook will save you.

Recovery is not indulgence — it’s procurement’s most underused strategy tool.
Because without recovery:

  • You don’t see vendor traps.

  • You don’t push back on monopoly logic.

  • You don’t notice when the numbers don’t add up.

AI won’t magically fix exhaustion, but it can buy back hours. Automate spend categorization. Let a model flag contract anomalies.

Free your brain for what only you can do — negotiate leverage, educate stakeholders, connect the dots.

While we’re on the subject of where strategy gets lost, a few of my recent posts dug into the same theme — savings that don’t stick, QBRs no one attends, and renewals that always start too late.

From the Feed

Instead of the usual news round-up, here’s what I published last week:

#1 – Savings at award can be meaningless: Pharma Edition 

Competitive bids aren’t always the cure.

You can celebrate savings on day one, only to watch them evaporate six months later if you don’t lock down post-award costs and governance.

How do you stop savings from being clawed back after the ink is dry? 

Check out the full post here.

 #2 – Quarterly Business Reviews 

A QBR without business stakeholders is just vendor marketing theater.

The only way to get them to show up is to anchor the session in their pain points, not just procurement’s trackers.

How do you get your business stakeholders to actually show up at QBRs? 

Check out the full post here.

#3 – The myth of “plenty of time”

That “we’ll deal with it later” mindset kills renewals.

Without a clear renewal calendar, procurement gets dragged in only once the fire is already burning. That’s why I built the Renewal Tracker.

Download it here.

The Bottom Line

Procurement doesn’t fail because we lack frameworks or tools — we fail when we’re too drained to use them.

Burnout is what blinds us to the traps:

  • We chase savings at award, then watch them vanish post-contract because we’re too exhausted to enforce governance.

  • We set QBRs, but without the energy to pull stakeholders in, they turn into vendor coffee chats.

  • We know renewals need nine months of prep, yet the mental bandwidth is gone until panic mode kicks in three months before.

This isn’t a knowledge gap. It’s a capacity gap.

Recovery and mental space aren’t luxuries — they’re the foundation of strategy.

Without them, even the smartest playbook collapses under pressure.

Stay rested, stay nerdy.

ANCHOR TOOLS

The IT Procurement Playbook

The IT Procurement Vault is not another “procurement toolkit.” It’s a battle-tested arsenal for buyers navigating aggressive vendors, shifting licensing models, and cloud chaos.

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Every high-performing LinkedIn post, template, and playbook — in one brutal, practical bundle. FREE.
Tactics for monopoly suppliers, SLA failures, SaaS traps, geopolitical risks, and vendor scorecards.

Until next time,

Zvi