Has the Blogging Thunder From Down Under Returned?

And is he going to guide us into a new age of “Contract Capital Management”?

Those of you who have been following the blogs since their dawn in Supply Management will remember the Vendor Management blog, which was maintained by Doug Hudgeon, the blogging thunder from down under, who used to be a regular participant in the great Supply Management blogsphere debates and who even guest posted on SI a few times. Then, a mere 18 months after accepting a position as Head of Procurement and Operations at Macquarie Bank, where he was crazy busy from day one, he was promoted to Macquarie Group Head of Operations for Macquarie Services because he did such an awesome job. At this point he want from crazy busy to insanely busy, and though he still managed to maintain a regular voice in the blogsphere, his contributions quickly trailed off from a couple a week to a couple a month. They stabilized at this point until the big guns realized that he was still kicking so much @ss that he had to be promoted again, at which point they promoted him again to Head of Client Engagement & P2P, where he was essentially responsible for all services and P2P across the entire global organization (which has over 14,000 employees in 70 locations in 28 countries who managed assets of over 300 Billion US). At this point he went from insanely busy to unimaginably busy and disappeared from the blogsphere for weeks at a time, though he was still locatable if you had the time to search. But then the Macquarie Group decided that it was time that they too opened a financial shared services center in India to support their global operations and that it would be up to Doug to make it so. So last summer he penned a goodbye to the blogsphere and boarded his plane to Delhi, en-route to Gurgaon, and we all wondered if we’d ever hear from him again.

But then, a few weeks ago, without any announcement or fanfare, a new post appeared on a new site dedicated to “Contract Capital Management”. It didn’t say much except that Doug was still alive and still toiling away in the bowels of India, and that he had discovered that HR is the best model for a P2P function to use when describing their role within an organization … and now we’re on the edge waiting to see what else he has learned from the daughters of darkness.

For those of you who don’t remember Doug, or need their memory refreshed, he authored these classic thought-pieces over on Vendor Management (which are now archived on Contract Capital Management):

  • Are your vendors the Spice Girls or Arcadia?
  • Blue Ocean Strategy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion
  • Buzzword Lifecycle Management (BLM) and Procurement
  • Prisoner’s dilemma in long term supplier relationships
  • Is Your Spouse Too Hot?
  • Seven Deadly Challenges
  • Measuring procurement performance: Does it need to be complex?

As well as these guest posts on Sourcing Innovation:

  • Rogers and Hammerstein: The Future of Sourcing
  • The Top Three: Dale Earnhardt

Welcome back Doug!