Category Archives: Talent

SIRI: Not Just for Radio Anymore

Over on the Purchasing Certification Blog, Charles’ just penned a great post on why “your procurement resume needs to have more of these four words”: Saved, Increased, Reduced, and Improved.

Charles’ is right when he notes that these are the result-oriented words that hiring managers and CPOs want to see, read, and hear. CPOs don’t want to hear what they already know you did. Every Procurement Pro manages, negotiates, analyzes, and contracts. They want to hear that when you managed, you improved efficiency. That when you negotiated, you saved big money. That when you analyzed, you reduced demand for indirect goods and services. And that when you contracted, you actually improved supplier relations.

If you’re looking for more tips on what you should be saving, increasing, reducing, and improving, check out this post from 2009 on how to get noticed and keep your sourcing or procurement job.

Stop Hoarding and Invest In Your Supply Chain

By now you might think SI is a broken record, since this is the third day in a row it has complained about the fact that the “Global 2000” are hoarding cash like it’s never to be seen again, but when even Forbes.com decides companies are hoarding too much cash, as per its recent article on how cash isn’t king, this should drive the point home.

And the situation is even worse than Financial Director and Hackett reported. According to a recent Forbes article, the Federal Reserve reported in June that U.S. businesses were saving cash at unprecedented levels, with balances climbing to 1.9 Trillion! That’s 2.23 times the cash reserves of the top 1000. If the situation is the same in Europe, cash reserves must be topping 1.6 Trillion Euros (or 2.16 Trillion US). That’s an estimated 4 Trillion in cash reserves! To put this in perspective, this is 100 Million jobs for one year at the average US salary, and unemployment is roughly 74.7 Million across the US and the EU. Get the picture?

Now, saving for a rainy day sometimes makes sense, but when you start saving to the point where even your investors are concerned that cash is not being put to work earning a reasonable return, not only are you helping to tank the economy, but you are biting the hand that feeds. And given that, due to the lack of innovation and planning, which is largely due to the lack of manpower to do innovation and planning, your transportation costs are about to soar, your commodity costs are rising across the board, and your current talent pool is overworked, unhappy, and ready to change jobs as soon as the next better offer comes along (with job satisfaction at an all time low), how much longer can you really afford not to invest in new talent and new technology to help them innovate your way to a better future?

Then, as the Forbes article points out, as the ever increasing gap between high-quality borrowers (you) and low quality borrowers (your cash-poor suppliers) widens, more and more of your suppliers will experience cash flow issues (as you are not only hoarding all your cash, but borrowing from limited funding reserves to do so). This will lead some into bankruptcy and failure, which will create disruptions in the supply chain that will disrupt your operations and cost you sales and brand equity and, in the end, time and resources to regain your customers’ trust. But all of this can be prevented by investing into your supply chain up front. It’s your choice. Spend and profit. Or hoard and lose.

Nothing for Nothing

After reading this recent article over on Chief Executive on how 66% of CEOs Plan to Freeze or Downsize Workforce Size which also pointed out how the majority of CEOs expect capital expenditures to remain flat, as per Chief Executive’s monthly survey of CEOs’ perception of overall business conditions (that garnered 247 responses), I can’t help but think of No Sale, No Store by the Arrogant Worms:

…
This week!
This week only!
We pay the GST!
We pay the PST!
We pay for delivery!
We pay for everything!
How do we do it?
How do we offer these fabulous deals?
Volume!
We got the most!
The best!
The worst!
We've got it all!
We’ve got everything!
Except one thing...
What’s that?
We've got no store!
No products!
So come on down!
This week!
…
Every week!
Every year!
No money down!
No payment ever!
That’s nothing for nothing!

Simply put, no new investments into new technology to increase productivity to give current staff time to create new products and services and no new staff to create new products and services creates an innovation free company. An innovation free company has nothing to offer. And you get nothing for nothing. It’s a lose-lose all the way around (as new technologies sit on the shelf and talent sits on the couch.) There’s no sale, as there’s no store.

Does Outsourcing Save Jobs?

A recent article over on Global Services on “Outsourcing often Mischaracterized as Evil and Insidious” states that outsourcing costs jobs is one of the myths that turn outsourcing into an epithet.

The article states that it is a jobs fallacy that when a job disappears in a western country and turns up in India it was exported by a nefarious businessmen. The article claims that the reality is that the job was exported because the job has been uneconomic to maintain in the West, whether or not India exists. The example given in the article is that when Carly Fiorina exported 35,000 jobs, it was the right decision, because if HP did not remain competitive in fiercely competitive markets, HP would have lost 100,000 jobs. In addition, if a certain job gets too expensive to do, such as calling a patient to remind her to take her medications, then it will disappear. But if it can be outsourced at an affordable cost, it will not.

I certainly buy the second argument. But I don’t know how far I buy the first. Costs have to be kept under control to support solvency and maintain jobs, but does this mean they always have to be outsourced? Sometimes it’s just a matter of increasing productivity. While that may be hard to do in online customer support, in certain areas of manufacturing, new technology and processes might be all that is needed if the plant is put in an area where costs are low or government incentives are high. In other words, outsourcing may not always be saving as many jobs as other methods could. It’s a balance.

Education is Getting Worse by the Day

According to a recent article in the Washington Times which indicates that scores show students aren’t ready for college, only 25% of students cleared all of ACT’s college preparedness benchmarks. This says that 3 out of 4 graduates are not prepared for college and will likely need to take at least one remedial class. This is appalling!

Not only are six of seven American adults not “proficient” at math (as per an article on “why American consumers can’t add” (MSNBC)), but one in four can’t even handle College level English! (Despite the fact that at least four in five households speak English as a first language!)

How did public education get so bad? And how will we ever solve the talent crunch without more highly educated graduates?