Procurement & Career Guidance
In corporate America, we often get stuck in legacy patterns of activity… we do it because the people before did it and people still want it.
It is hard to shake free of these patterns or at the very least, determine if they are still needed.
But one way to improve and validate your work is to talk to the people who actually consume your work… TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!
Communication in the business world is difficult. It is usually the root cause of most major issues.
For Procurement Professionals, it is our job to convene and communicate. In an imperfect world this is a perfect recipe for frustration.
I take the perspective of procurement customers in this video and try to address identify their frustrations and explain why sourcing departments act the way they do.
Exchanging business cards was an important part of the customer/client relationship. Since COVID, there are less face to face meetings and less cards being exchanged. Couple that with evolving communication technology and a person can wonder if the business card is past its prime.
This video discusses the potential demise of the business card and provides a full tutorial on making your own NFC business card (you are going to need these blank NFC cards).
The tutorial offers a solution that is significantly cheaper than Linq or Popl.
One of the most frequently asked procurement questions is… “how does procurement get a seat at the table?”
For non-procurement people, this means:
This video covers 5 techniques to improve procurement and business engagement:
As budgets are settling down and getting approved for many of the companies I’m on the board of, I’m seeing a general trend of much less headcount growth in 2017 than in 2016. In some cases, companies got ahead of themselves. In others, they need to integrate all the people they’ve added. In some, they feel like they have a critical mass of people and want to march to get profitable on current headcount. And still others are profitable and have realized significant operating leverage in the past two quarters that they want to continue.
http://www.feld.com/archives/2017/01/2017-year-flat-headcount.html
Brin encourages experimentation and innovation, just as one of his professors did when he wanted to leave Stanford to launch Google. But his career has taught him that the future is impossible to predict. He is cautious in his forecasts.
“The evolution of technology might be inherently chaotic,” he said. “We have a set of values and desires today that are probably pretty different than before the Industrial Revolution, and different still than before the Agrarian Revolution. And we might continue to evolve.”
Executives and product teams shouldn’t wait until a product breaks to hear from their customers. My team, for example, recently executed a high-stakes redesign and overhaul of our central product. While we always strive to incorporate customer feedback and interaction into our day-to-day work, we worked with around 16,000 customers to receive feedback on different versions of our new product. Our entire process was oriented around continuous customer feedback — and it transformed the way we do business. We now collaborate with 11,000 customers who give us a constant look at how our product helps them solve the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.
You may wonder, then, what’s the point of setting goals, working hard, and ending up somewhere you never intended to be? How can you make progress if you continually break course? How can you be successful if you can’t even follow a straight line?
Here’s the thing: The more activities you participate in, the more people you meet, the more opportunities you grab hold of, the more likely you are to find something amazing along the way—regardless of (or maybe especially if), your path is quite windy. In the words of the inimitable Oprah Winfrey, “Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”
Photo: Ales Krivec