Although we don’t necessarily have much more of a visibility horizon than we’ve had for months, things at least seem to be stabilizing. Events are starting to focus on next year, and they provide a sense of what is within our control. That is far more productive and positive than continuing to focus on everything that is out of control.

August hasn’t been as busy as June and July were, but the pace of new events is already picking up for September. There are already 12 events on the calendar for next month, half of which I added this week. If you are also a fan of Art of Procurement, run by my colleague Philip Ideson, you’ll want to SAVE THE DATE for AOP Mastermind Live: October 6-7.

I get a lot of questions about what events I list in the BMP calendar and how I decide what to recommend. I have always believed that the calendar needed to be an industry resource, not a revenue source. BMP receives no money for any of the webinar listings, does not guarantee that any events will be recommended in advance, and does not (knowingly) list demo events. If you have any questions about our listing and recommendation policies, feel free to reach out. Similarly, if you have a thought leadership-based webinar that you think the procurement community would like to know about, please send it my way!

It would seem that we are going to have a summer slowdown after all. There weren’t enough events to pick from last week, so I skipped my recommendations post, and there are only a few for this week but they are worthwhile. On the bright side, I already know there will be event recommendations for next week as well.

As we close out the end of July, webinars are just starting to post for August. If you look at all of this week’s webinars, there is a clear note of defiant optimism with the focus returning to supply resiliency, leadership, and automation over necessary but fatigued coverage of the pandemic. Next week also marks the release of the July ISM-New York Report on Business, so we’ll get another look at how the professional services economy is recovering from the various shutdowns.

Following is a list of the upcoming webinars that are worth of an hour of your (scarce) time. Some I recommend for the topic, others for the speaker, but all of them will give you something new to think about – and goodness knows, we can all use more good ideas to stand up to the challenges 2020 has handed us.