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Hi {{FIRST_NAME|readers}},

Labor Day is around the corner. And for a lot of you, that long weekend is the quiet before a wave of project kickoffs 😅

Fresh budgets freed up. Implementations greenlit. SOWs signed. Teams mobilizing in September.

So before the machine starts turning, I wanted to ask… Have you given enough thought to the single most important success factor for your project?

Not the platform. Not the brand on the statement of work.

The individuals who will actually deliver for you.

In tonight's note, we get into that success factor, and how to buy it on purpose.

Otherwise, I wanted to highlight that last week's deep dive sparked some great discussion on LinkedIn (download the ebook here).

The most thoughtful of it came from Oscar Fernández, who wrote a full article challenging some of the points I made, which kicked off a genuinely good “Build vs Buy” back-and-forth in the comments.

Thanks to Oscar for that. These discussions are how we get to higher levels of digital literacy.

Onwards!

📰 In this week’s edition:

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Harley-Davidson is rebellious.

Toyota is dependable.

Rolex is luxurious.

Apple is for creative people.

None of that is printed on the product. We put it there.

And we fall for it even when we know we're falling for it. (I do. Every single time.)

We want social status. Risk reduction. Emotional resonance. To belong to a tribe that looks like the person we think we are. So we let the brand quietly make the decision… then we reverse-engineer a "rational" business case to justify what we already chose subconsciously.

Fine. That's a $30 sunglasses decision.

The problem is we do the exact same thing when we're spending seven figures on procurement technology.

You already know how that sentence ends.

"Let's use [Big Consulting Brand]."

Wait. What?

The brand on the statement of work has almost nothing to do with whether your implementation succeeds. I should know. I worked for one of them. I subcontracted for plenty of others.

Here's what actually moves the needle.

The success of your implementation is 99% the collective experience, cultural fit, and strength of the specific people you will sit across from every week to get this thing live.

The other 1%? The brand. The logo. The "global methodology." The client references (from a team that delivered a project halfway around the world, three years ago, that you will never meet… And that your delivery team has never met either…).

Those assets are worthless if the humans on YOUR project weren't involved in building them and don't know how to use them.

A framework nobody on your team masters is just a PDF.

A reference from a team you'll never work with is just a story.

→ Great brand, great product, weak delivery team? You're out of luck.

→ Mediocre brand, average product, great delivery team? Results will follow. They'll find a way.

Every time.

I've watched "safe," brand-name engagements stall for years because the A-team that pitched got swapped for juniors the week after signing. And I've watched scrappy teams on unglamorous tools quietly deliver, because the people knew what they were doing and actually cared.

The difficult part of getting technology working is never the technology.

It's the humans.

You stop buying the logo. You start buying the people who will deliver for YOU.

Here's how you force that into a procurement process that's built to sell you the opposite:

Brands are engineered to make you stop thinking. That's their job…

Yours is to think anyway.

So next time you're buying technology (or the service provider to implement it) through a procurement process, strip out the brand paraphernalia and put the weight where the outcome actually lives:

On the specific humans who will deliver for you.

The tech will do what it's told.

The humans are the whole game.