Daily Archives: May 1, 2011

People are the most important resource in today’s global economy!

Especially since, with the retirement of the baby boomer generation, there will be fewer of them with the necessary skills who will be able and ready to work for your organization in the coming years.

So, don’t just manage your talent, as more and more articles are telling you to do, train your talent, empower your talent, reward your talent, and trust your talent.

With employee morale at an all-time low and the number of employees looking to change jobs at an all time high, you need to be different. How about you stop treating them like expendable resources and liabilities and start treating them like irreplaceable assets who can be trusted to do the job they were hired for? Just a thought.

Keeping Strategic Decisions on Track and the CFO Happy

A recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly on “How CFOs can keep strategic decisions on track” is a good read for any CPO looking to impress the C-Suite. Noting that judgement can often be colored by self-interest, and that CFOs are generally the most disinterested parties where strategic decisions are concerned, the article points out how a disinterested CFO can often provide hard financial data to counter inherent biases.

This implies that a great way to keep your strategic supply management decisions on track, keep the CFO happy, and impress the C-Suite is to run your proposals, with your projections, by the CFO before you take them to the rest of the executive suite. And if you need number crunching help, and they have staff, the CFO, who will likely be impressed that you asked for help before making a final recommendation, will probably be glad to lend you some support to confirm or verify your projections. Not always, but much more likely than if you make a presentation first and ask for help later.