I was struck by this image from NEMOA last week.
This image was from a post that was liked 45 times as of Friday. I've given you every piece of knowledge I have for nearly twenty years (for free ... for free) and nothing I've shared on LinkedIn has been liked 45 times ... even though what I've shared will make you 450,000x more profit than the image above.
One of the pure joys of being in business is being part of a team. The image above represents a team. Do they wall work for the same company? No. Do they work together to create their version of the future? Absolutely! One of the spoils of working together is spending a tiny fraction of the profit generated by a team on "the finer things".
In the era of videoconferencing, teams changed. In catalog marketing, it's common to see employees feel like their vendor partners are more of a "teammate" than are co-workers. You'll spend more time on video conferences with vendor partners than with merchants / creatives / web ops etc. This dynamic, of course, creates conflicting incentives. Your company pays your salary and bonus, so it's your job to maximize profit for your company. Your "team", however, does not share your incentive structure. Each member of your team has different incentives. Does your paper rep care about your bonus structure? Kind of. But she cares far more that you use more paper ... her incentive structure requires her to generate more profit for her than for your brand. If you lose more money by not moving into the future, she makes more money. That's a problem. It's unavoidable.
In order to optimize the profit of your informal "team" across vendors, your brand likely makes less profit. You're not trying to make less profit, of course, but it's the nature of the beast. Everybody has to be successful. In a perfect world, the relationship is symbiotic. In the real world? No.
Modern business sure is fascinating, isn't it?