Monthly Archives: November 2011

Want To Keep the Edge in Negotiations? Be Wary of Social Media

Earlier this year SI published a post on Common Negotiation Ploys that will be utilized by your sales counterparts every chance they get to try and gain the upper hand. We warned you that you had to be knowledgeable about each and every single one of these ploys because your sales counterparts, who get weeks of training before they’re even let out into the field in a supporting sales work, will do whatever they can to get the upper hand — and that’s the last thing you want.

In particular, you have to be wary of the

  • Getting to Know You,
  • Making an Impression, and
  • Mirroring

ploys because if you let the sales person become your friend, it will be a lot harder to stay impartial and bring your A-game, as you won’t want to beat him down and, more importantly, you’ll be a lot more likely to fall for the other ploys as you won’t want to believe that he’s trying to play you for the fool.

It used to be that a sales person had to show up, wine you and dine you to get to know you. But now, thanks to social media, he can learn more about you in a few hours of background research than a few months of relationship building, all thanks to online reputation monitoring tools that allow him to gather and review every single piece of data you share on social network sites. If you’re not careful on sites like Facebook and Twitter, the salesperson will know your favourite sport, your favorite team, your favorite wine, and your favorite restaurant and invite you out for an evening discussion of their upcoming product release which will just happen to be at your favorite restaurant, where your favorite wine will be waiting at the table when you arrive, followed by a trip to the ballpark to see your favorite team, at home, square off against their arch rivals. And that discussion will just happen to address how they are going to solve four of the five biggest problems you have, which the sales person will already know.

And while you might think this sounds great, the reality is that your barriers will be weakened because of the comfort level you feel at your favorite restaurant and favorite ball park and then shattered by a discussion of what your problems are. You’ll then believe that the salesperson represents a vendor who actually cares about you and who actually wants to solve your problems when, in fact, the vendor has no intention of changing its roadmap and the “solutions” being spun are not solutions at all but temporary band-aids with weak glue that fall off as soon as they get a little wet. But the story will be so nicely spun, and a discussion of release dates so carefully avoided, that you’ll think the vendor is spinning gold when, in fact, the vendor is melting lead.

And the vendor will know all this because he will have read every tweet you ever made that relates to an interest or like, consumed your Facebook profile and all common threads, monitored every LinkedIn group you were involved in, and reviewed any and every presentation or paper you shared online in the past two years. That’s why, as HP VP Scott McClellan found out earlier this year when he demonstrated the “hazard of sharing LinkedIn profiles”, you have to be careful what you post on-line. It’s not just your friends who will be following you, but your enemies. And they will be paying MUCH closer attention.

CBTM #1: The Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates


Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja of The MPower Group, who declared that Strategic Sourcing is Dead last year, and who has returned to stir up a new hornet’s nest.

“Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates” is the headline of a major research project by CAPS Research. I am glad that they are bringing renewed attention to this issue. My problem is that if you go back in the history of our profession, this issue has been in the top three issues of EVERY poll, research, think tank pronouncement, conference, etc. for close to two decades! My history goes back over three decades in the world of Supply Chain and I can remember in the early 90’s when this started to become a critical issue. And yet, here we are gathering insight yet again. We started this conversation by first defining who YOU are. Clearly not a scientific analysis but close enough for government work. We then drew some insights from the profile that was created.

Let me take the liberty of using the title to develop my call to action. Let’s start with DIFFICULTY. The question we need to ask ourselves is why are we dealing with difficulty? Clearly we are facing difficulty as a result of whatever we did or more importantly did not do in the past. We have never identified talent as a top priority in our organizations. And before you quickly pull out your strategic presentation to point to the slides, my first question will be to ask for a history of your training investment over the last five years. In fact, take a look at your total investment over the last five years in supporting your Talent strategy and compare it to other investments that your corporation has made. I bet it is nowhere close!!! How does your new hire program fare under that scrutiny? Has it been increasing over the last five years? Is the leadership in your Supply Chain organization specifically measured AND incented on the maximization of Talent? Are your people specifically measured AND incented on acquiring new competencies (not skills, not training . . . . . more on that later)? These are but some of the things that would explain the inclusion of the word DIFFICULTY in the research. At our last NPX conference and a recent Gartner event, numbers like 50, 100, 200, and 400 were being tossed as the current need of some major Global corporations in their Supply Chain organizations. I will let you digest those numbers for now and we will come back to them later. By the way, once you decide to invest in your Talent, there is an incredible amount of lead time that is required to make that happen. Those companies that are looking to hire 50 to 400 new people should have started 12 to 18 months ago.

If you are still defining FINDING as developing a job description and handing it off to your HR rep and waiting for the candidates to roll in … good luck! You need to step back and understand what your real needs are in terms of competencies for the roles that you are looking to fill. Because FINDING is also a function of what you define as QUALIFIED. You then need to develop an aggressive, comprehensive approach to attract and retain the right candidates. And unless you have thought your way through that entire life cycle, you will never resolve the issue. Let me illustrate with an actual case study. We were asked by the CFO of a major bank to help figure out why they were not able to attract any candidates to even show up at the campus job fairs for their New Hire program. We helped them realize that their brand name was not enough to attract candidates anymore. The real issues were that the prospects did not know what they wanted to do in banking yet and did not want to commit so early in their life. We redesigned the entire New Hire program to include structured six month rotations for the 1st two years (and their selections would be considered), a leadership member assigned as a formal mentor (and feedback provided by mentored to CFO on mentoring), internal job fairs by senior executives of various organizations in the bank, a “friend” assigned from the previous rotation “class”, formal group meetings where the entire “class” would get together to provide feedback, etc. And then we redesigned their marketing strategy (yes, you need to have a marketing strategy!). They had lines forming up at the campus job fairs!

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, ALL of these issues are intertwined and tied together (but I’m jumping ahead of myself). For example, if your definition of QUALIFIED does not really match your needs, you will always have DIFFICULTY FINDING candidates. The definition of QUALIFIED has to be based on the real needs of your “clients”. One of the constructs that has proven very powerful as an image that we use with our clients is to think of your organization as a consulting company. You would quickly realize that your ONLY asset that delivers value to your clients is your organizational competency and talent. Therefore, you must match your competencies to the needs of your clients, both for today and tomorrow. Otherwise, you will always be FINDING because developing organizational competency has a significant lead time.

Case in point: We just had a conversation with the CIO of a Fortune 20 client leading to the conclusion that his organizational competency was geared towards new solutions that his group had been rolling out very successfully. His problem was that his clients had not yet “adopted” the solutions yet … meaning that they had not been fully deployed. The Intended Consequences of the clients had not yet been realized. What he quickly realized was that he needed to immediately develop significant deployment competencies. Think of it as surveying your market to understand what their needs are going to be so that you can ensure that you have the right organizational competencies to deliver the value when your clients need it. Ideally, you should be a step ahead.

Finally, what do you define as a SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE? I guess we first need to decide what Supply Management is. Because if your definition is focused on the Supply Base and managing costs and lead times and someone else is looking at the entire value conversion process, then your SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE is going to look rather different from your competitor. If you think the role of Supply Management is to run an efficient process to ensure lowest cost, then you are probably not looking for candidates who can look upstream and downstream and start maximizing the entire system as opposed to the tail of the dog (supply base). If you think that Supply Management is all about the process of defining requirements and negotiating contracts, then you are probably don’t want candidates with all those so called soft skills (collaboration, teams, problem solving, etc.). Now you can see why we seem to have DIFFICULTY FINDING QUALIFIED SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATES.

Stay tuned for our next post where we discuss Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM) as a platform for solving some of the issues we have raised here. If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.

To Green Your Supply Chain, Start with Packaging

Just about everything these days is still overpackaged. From the software DVD that comes in a box big enough to hold 20 to 50 of them to the laundry detergent that takes a box at least twice as large as necessary as it is not concentrated to even the bottle you’re drinking your water from, everything is overpackaged. The water bottle is a good case in point. You’re probably thinking this is probably the most compact packaging there is as, at least in this case, it’s usually 95% to 98% full, in addition to being light. However, in many cases, better technology can reduce the plastic required by half!

For example, as pointed out in this recent article on a “Chain Reaction” in Materials Management & Distribution, Nestle Waters Canada has been able to reduce the amount of plastic required to make a half-litre bottle from 20g to 9.1g! That just tells you how much overpackaging there is in the average densely packaged product with poorly designed packaging. And considering how wasteful packaging is to begin with (even if its recycled, as a lot of energy goes into producing packaging, and a lot more into recycling it), this is bad.

Furthermore, not only will you green your supply chain if you save packaging (as you will be using less raw materials and energy), but you’ll be saving a lot of money, as you will be able to fit more product on a truck, or ship the same amount of product with less fuel (as it will weigh less).

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels

In honour of the Occupy Suburbia movement, I give you, to the tune of Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue:

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels

Friday night and I need to eat
Some vegetables and a slice of meat
A slice of bread and a side of slaw
Would go quite well inside my gaping maw

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Short legs and feathery tails
Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Running wild through the hay bales
Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Flat ears, Racoon trails

It’s too late, they’re in charge
From suburb’s edge to your backyard
Red Tail squirrels and they can’t be beat
Drive you out of your home and into the street

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
In your pool house and at the pool side
Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Taking over your dwelling, it’s a red tide
Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Raising Hell in your kitchen with pride

Have you read the news
In the Soho Tribune
Ya know they marched in
and then they demanded pie

We thought we were neighbours
On two sides of the door
I tell ya what, man
They moved in, the occupation began
I don’t know the story
Or if they’ve got a plan

Suburbia, Your Town, Now
They’ll get inside, I don’t know how
Looking for pie, goodies, and treats
Cream filled twinkies and other good eats

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
Lead the charge, for pie they’ll trot
Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels
They want Crisco in every crockpot!

Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels

Wanted: Talent-Driven Innovation

While we’re on the subject of talent and the importance thereof to a successful Supply Management organization, a topic that we will address further in the weeks to come, it is fruitful to point out a “recent article” over on Industry Week by Stephen Gold, the CEO of Manufacturers Alliance, who asks a very important question:

Can the United States meet the challenge of creating the skilled workforce needed for manufacturing leadership?

After all, if we are going to homeshore and bring jobs back, due to the rising transportation and labour costs in the developing world, as well as the considerable overhead imposed by various import and security laws, we need a workforce that can handle them. And considering that the manufacturing workforce has declined 40% over the last 20 years, it could be difficult to bump it back up quickly given the skills required for your average production line these days.

Given that the #1 driver of competitiveness is talent-driven innovation, if the US can’t step up its game, the emerging markets may take the lead. Especially given that countries such as Germany, China and India have done far more in recent years to encourage innovation (and in turn build vibrant manufacturing bases) in their own backyards than the US has done. And given that high-skill employment has risen 17% while low-skill employment has dropped 9%, there is a double challenge to be faced. Furthermore, with the recent de-emphasis of math and science in primary and secondary schools, and the corresponding decline in math, science, and engineering degrees from 11% to 7%, there is, in actuality, a triple challenge to be faced. (And that’s not considering the fact that a global assessment ranks US students 23rd in science and 30th in math!)

The US may be able to rise to the challenge, but, like Rocky, they’ll have to have the eye of the tiger to do it. What do you think?