This week’s webinar notes are from the October Next Level Purchasing Association members-only webinar, and featured Donald Jean, CEO of Focused Buyer, a purchasing and trading website that also provides payment services and financial records support. If you are not already a member of NLPA, we highly recommend that you sign up. Membership is free and includes benefits such as their monthly webinars.
This week’s featured webinar notes are from a recent IACCM event called ‘Negotiating Across Cultures: Understanding the Differences, Avoiding the Pitfalls’ which was hosted by Tim Cummins and Karen Walch. If you are an IACCM member, you can view the event on demand after logging in on their site.
This week’s featured webinar was the monthly event run by the Next Level Purchasing Association on 20 Ways To Create The Perfect Negotiation First Impression. If you missed the event, you can read a related blog post by Association President and CPO Charles Dominick.
You can also learn more about negotiation (among other topics) at the first Next Level Purchasing Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA September 12-13, 2013.
This week’s featured webinar was presented by Ardent Partners: ‘Game of Thrones: How a Strong CFO-CPO Alliance Can Command Top Performance’. I’ve only seen one episode of the HBO series Game of Thrones – I didn’t have the nerves or the stomach to watch another – but luckily for me there was no violence or bloodshed involved in this webinar.
This week’s featured event was hosted by Sourcing Interests Group and presented by IBM's Institute for Business Value or IBV. IBM just released the largest, most comprehensive Chief Procurement Officer Study ever conducted, with participation from 1,128 CPOs from organizations with annual revenue in excess of US$1 billion.
IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBV) just released the largest, most comprehensive Chief Procurement Officer Study ever conducted, with participation from 1,128 CPOs from organizations with annual revenue in excess of US$1 billion. According to the study, “Companies with high performing procurement organizations have profit margins 15 percent higher than the average company and 22 percent higher than those of companies with lower performing procurement organizations.”
Many of us have taken the Myers-Briggs personality test, either in school or on the job. One of the core principles is that there are no bad personality types. Taking the test is supposed to help you know yourself better, understanding your natural inclinations. That way, when you are under stress, not only will you be able to predict how you are likely to react to different situations, you may be able to alter your reaction to reach a desired result.
The End of Competitive Advantage by Columbia Business School Professor Rita Gunther McGrath provides a perspective on the way businesses should develop and maintain their strategy to remain competitiv...
There is much to be learned from our failures, and in many cases they are the price of admission to the victory celebration at the end of the journey. Thomas Edison is a fantastic, if complicated, example of success despite setbacks. We all know how many tries to took to make the light bulb a reality, especially because of the quote Cindy used to open her post:
We have some active discussions in the Buyers Meeting Point Group on LinkedIn, most recently, an exchange about what makes a good buyer. Ironically, it was asked by someone who is not a buyer themselves.
This week’s featured event was hosted by the Next Level Purchasing Association and was presented by Tim Reis, a procurement manager with 10 years of experience, a regular columnist for Next Level Purchasing’s online magazine and a holder of the SPSM certification. Most importantly, he is an active practitioner.
A cardinal principle of Total Quality escapes too many managers: you cannot continuously improve interdependent systems and processes until you progressively perfect interdependent, interpersona...
I can tell you that windsurfing is very easy – except for the wind. The wind makes it tricky, of course. It’s not particularly difficult to find and rent great equipment, and the techniques are fairly...
This week’s featured webinar was hosted by BravoSolution with main speaker Andrew Bartolini of Ardent Partners. In addition to being the Managing Partner and Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners, Andrew also does most of the writing for their blog, CPO Rising. If you are interested in the movement of major corporate CPOs in and out of their roles, that is a great place to track them.
This week’s featured webinar was presented by ISM, Ariba, and CFO Research Services. It was based on a recent study of 263 finance executives from North America, Europe and Asia about their perceptions of procurement. The study was originally conducted in 2007, so this can also be considered a five-year revisit. If you are interested in reading the full report, you can download it for free (without registration) from CFO.com.
Written by the co-chairmen of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, an organization that helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and techn...
This week’s featured event was presented by Procurian, the new name for ICG Commerce. They officially changed their name in February of this year, at the same time as they launched a philosophy the call “New Procurement”. New Procurement is based on six principles, ranging from leveraging market intelligence to identifying and fueling new sources of growth.
This week’s featured event was presented by Sourcing Interests Group and Emptoris (an IBM Company). The main speaker, Mitch Plaat, is Con-way’s VP of Procurement and CPO and has been with the company for 22 years. He has overseen quite a transformation, starting six years ago with the decision to engage Emptoris for help in the form of solutions and services.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca (Roman Philosopher, 5 B.C.) Randy Pausch was a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon until 2008 when he lost his b...
If you’ve spent any time on our site this week, you’ll see that we are having a customer-service centric week. It all started when I attended last week’s Next Level Purchasing Association webinar where Peter Nero of Denali Group shared his thoughts on what is next for procurement. The answer was better customer service.
As a follow up, we spoke with The Sales Guy about the kinds of internal customer service he thinks procurement can provide, and this morning we read the Wikipedia article on customer service. We’re not looking to turn procurement into a transactional call center, but some of the traditional wisdom about how to keep your customers happy applies to the relationship between us and our internal stakeholders.
