Happy Saturday!
I am going to start the Linkfest this week with a quote from Bertrand Maltaverne of POOL4TOOL. We were having a Twitter conversation on procurement tech when he wrote something that really stood out to me – “tech is there to free up time to nurture relationships, not to kill ’em”. The takeaway for me: resist the urge to hide behind technology and use the time that it free’s up to invest in building stronger supplier relationships.
Here are the articles I wanted to share this week:
- Hillary Ohlmann of DeltaBid penned an interesting piece exploring the role of organizational culture on procurement: 4 Ways Company Culture Influences Procurement.
- It has been hard to miss Procurious’ Big Idea Summit this week and I know that we played a part in that! There is a ton of content at procurious.com and the Art of Procurement related to the event but there are two pieces that stood out for me that are summaries of panel disvussions: Don’t Let Procurement Be A Career Cul-de-Sac and Collectively Addressing Procurement’s Blind Spots.
- While on the topic of talent, I came across a concerning statistic this week as reported by CIPS – that almost 75% of Buyers have either never been trained in soft skills or were trained a long time ago? Does this reflect your team?
- I had the opportunity recently to hear Susan Grelling, a former CPO and Chief Risk Officer talk about the confluence of procurement and risk at a recent conference. Susan has written a piece that I came across that explores a basic question that we tend to overlook: what is risk? Check out the piece here: Defining Risk – Managing Risk as a Procurement Professional.
Have a great weekend,
Phil
PS – if you come across an article that you think we should read, please email is to contact@artofprocurement.com.
