Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Successful Supply Management Organizations are Empowered

“What Works for Nations Works for Business”, and what works for business works for organizations within the business — Supply Management included. This recent article, over on Chief Executive, that reviews the new book, Why Nations Fail, noted that just as nations flourish when they foster political and economic institutions, and they fail when power and opportunity are concentrated in the hands of the few, companies are setting themselves up for trouble when decision making is almost entirely restricted to top executives. Similarly, your Supply Management organization is setting itself up for trouble if all (major) decisions have to pass through the Director or, even worse, CPO.

In order for your supply management organization to be successful, your people have to not only be in a position to make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made, but feel empowered to make such decisions. They need to know what authority they have, when they have it, and feel trusted to use that authority. They should only be going to their manager, director, or CPO when a new issue arises that is beyond their experience where they should have some guidance to solve it. And if your supply chain organization is filled with talented, empowered people, this is not an event that should be happening every day.

I’m keeping this post short because I want you to read the article on “What Works for Nations Works for Business” and dig further into this issue, both in the SI archives and the CE publication. It’s one issue that should not be overlooked.

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

That’s great, it starts with a web-shake, noobs and trolls,
get terrified – the doctor is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to the web churn,
bloggers serve their own needs, dummy serve your own needs.
Feed it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength,
The ladder starts to clatter with fear fight down height.
Wire in a fire, representing seven games, entrepreneurs for hire and a lagging site.
Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furries breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing!
Fine, then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common news, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself.
Web serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
  dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right – right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

Last Friday, TechCrunch ran a post that asked Where the Hell Are All the Rants? that noted that ever since some of its most prolific writers left the blog game to either a) become entrepreneurs or b) become investors, the tech blogosphere has been quiet — too quiet. And by quiet I mean so noisy that it’s difficult for anything of any substance (or signal) to come through. And the doctor agrees. Lately, he’s been reading TechCrunch less and less. Heck, this week it was almost indistinguishable from TUAW with all the me-too Apple coverage. I have to say I miss the TechCrunch of old where the bloggers asked How the Hell is This My Fault because not only did those posts have substance, they had character. You can find bland coverage on any old site. But you can’t find deep thought, real opinions, and the willingness to call out the elephant in the room and call a duck a duck (when it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck) on any old site.

To cut to the chase, no rants, no real opinions and willingness to make them known. No real opinions and willingness to make them known, no individuality. No individuality, no point. And that’s why it just may be the end of TechCrunch as we know it.

The Insightful e-book Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide is still FREE!

That’s right, this illuminating e-book, co-authored by the doctor and Bernard Gunther of Lexington Analytics, now a division of Opera Solutions, which has already been downloaded over 2,450 times, is still completely and totally FREE.

This e-book, which is a rare medium well-dome, really is the definitive book on next level spend analysis performance. It’s one of the first books to not only get to the science of spend analysis, as compared to the elusive art, but to also provide you a detailed 10-step process that you can use to implement spend analysis in your organization and get real, repeatable, results — starting from your first project. And the numerous examples, backed up by 78 figures, really go the extra mile to making theory reality. There’s a reason it has been called one of the most comprehensive step-by-step resource guides I have seen for this industry and a reason the downloads keep going and going like the energizer bunny. It was written to help an average sourcing analyst get results, and that’s exactly what it does.

So if you still haven’t downloaded your FREE copy of Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide, do so today!

Looking for Something to Read this Weekend? Download Chris LaVictoire Mahai’s ROAR for FREE today only!

Chris LaVictoire Mahai, managing partner at AVEUS, a global strategy and operational change (consulting) firm (on LinkedIn), has made the e-book / Kindle version of his new book ROAR available for FREE on Amazon (at this link) TODAY (and Monday through Wednesday of next week) for anyone who wants it.

The book, which uses the animal kingdom as a metaphor for building peak performance, and includes interviews with several executives to explore what drives peak performance, was written in an effort to help companies adopt a systematic approach to strengthening their performance chain. A good performance chain must be fast, flexible, predictable, and leverageable — and simultaneously balancing these requirements to achieve better customer outcomes can be tricky. As Chris implies, it’s like trying to combine the best qualities of the cheetah, elephant, coyote, and ant into one animal. (The Greeks found it difficult to combine the Lion, Goat, and Snake into a Chimera. So imagine the challenge we’re faced with!)

the doctor hasn’t made it through the whole book let, but the lessons learned summarized in the 4-Lens Profile are good ones:

  • speed at any cost becomes a negative
  • predictability delivered too late or for something that has lost market appeal is of little value
  • flexibility that extends every process, decision, or outcome is more harmful than helpful
  • leverage of every resource to the nth degree will deteriorate performance and increase risk

So, anything you can take away from Rashida Cheetah, Oralee Elephant, Ace Coyote, or Rickie Ant, or, better yet, the many executives that Mr. Mahai interviewed, is definitely worth your time.