I humbly present Watkinson's first law of innovation:

Any firm's ability to change is inversely proportional to the length of time it takes to get a new supplier from proposal to purchase order plus the length of payment terms.

ability to change = 1/(time to get started + time to get paid)

This idiotic but remarkably accurate predictor works for several reasons:

Taking forever to execute basic processes is generally a sign that there is horrendous red-tape, legacy systems, clumsy manual processes, bureaucracy or a general lack of urgency about the place. If these exist in one place in the business, they tend to exist everywhere which makes change difficult.

Second, if it takes forever to get paid you can tell that the finance function of the business have abandoned innovation as a means to growth and have settled into tweaking cashflow, bullying suppliers and needle-dicking with ROI calculations rather than taking risks that could bring substantial rewards. If we take payment terms as a proxy for a company's sense of their own bargaining power, excessively long terms are often a sign of arrogance - another barrier to change.

If it takes a year to raise a PO and they insist on 90 days terms, you're doomed! 😝

See this post on LinkedIn