Monthly Archives: July 2026

A Key Leadership Skill for Procurement … Is NOT What You Think.

There’s a lot of great posts on leadership, so we’re not going to discuss what a leader is. (And if you don’t know, go find them and come back.)

But leadership is more than just what you think about. It’s not just the attributes you associate with command, authority, and communication … and the greatness you expect from people that attain the position. It’s also the attributes you associate with submission, anarchy, and concealment … which you might associate with followers, lack of leadership, or walled organizations. (But that’s another post.)

But the most overlooked skill for Procurement, as Garry point out in a LinkedIn post on the leadership skill no one talks about, is the ability to end things. In fact, a CPO’s ability to end things is more important than a CEO’s ability to end things. (But that’s likely another post as well.)

In Procurement, especially a poorly functioning Procurement organization, a lot of things will need to be ended:

  • the people who were placed in, but don’t belong in, Procurement will need to be removed — if the organization won’t transfer them, they’ll need to be let go
  • the supplier relationships that aren’t working will need to be ended as soon as possible
  • the consulting relationships offering no value (and just billing hours for nothing) need to be axed
  • the processes that aren’t working need to stop (and they will need to be replaced with modern processes that do)
  • the data silos that aren’t connected, aren’t up to date, and aren’t usable need to be connected and updated or deleted
  • the systems and software not meeting Procurement needs must be disposed of

That’s a lot of endings that need to occur before new beginnings can take place.

And if these endings don’t happen, Procurement will collapse and maybe even take the organization with it. As Garry notes, organizations don’t collapse from lack of beginnings, they collapse from an inability to stop!

Turst is Real Procurement Currency — And That’s Why AI CANNOT Do Procurement!

A couple of months ago Garry addressed a point made by the Peter Smith, the Bad Buying Bard, which boiled down to an issue more important than anything technical where AI is concerned … and that point is Trust.

In his original post, Gary asked if AI would change Procurement. However, after reading Peter’s comment, he realized the real question is whether Procurement is trusted enough that the organization will accept Procurement setting the rules around how AI is used. As Garry notes, that’s the crux.

When it comes to trust, it’s not whether or not the suppliers trust Procurement that’s the real issue, it’s whether Procurement is trusted internally. If Procurement is not trusted, it will be bypassed, ignored, and even sabotaged. This includes the (mis)use of AI. If Procurement is not trusted, it will not have any authority, and the organization will not heed their warnings (based on logic and the research they are used to doing), charge ahead with AI, and become yet another failure contributing to the 94%+ failure rate (while costing the organization millions upon millions of dollars and wiping out any savings Procurement may generate, especially if the C-Suite dictates an AI-first solution for Procurement).

Furthermore, you can’t use tools that you cannot trust. And you can’t trust any Gen-AI Procurement platforms built on hallucinatory LLMs. Since hallucinations are a core feature, results can’t be guaranteed, and LLMs can’t even be counted on to follow explicit instructions (and will corrupt your documents and data even when explicitly told not to), you can’t use Gen-AI/LLM-based AI.

And, unless your data is clean, categorized, up-to-date, and easily accessible through modern APIs, “classic” AI won’t work either. Good Procurement Pros will remind you that you can’t jump straight to AI. Just like you couldn’t expect a tribesmen from a culture with no written word who never set foot in modern civilization to begin reading lessons on the works of Shakespeare accessible only on a modern tablet, you can’t jump decades of technology. Or process.

Successful Procurement requires:

  1. getting your processes in order
  2. getting the supporting data in order
  3. implementing classic technology with high-degrees of deterministic, dependable, determination

And then, and only then, do you sit down, identify where there are still inefficiencies and/or a lot of tactical bit-pushing work, and try to figure out where AI will actually help. This means that most organizations are still years behind where they need to be to successfully implement any AI. In the classic Hackett journey to best-in-class, which will take an average large multi-national 8 years, it will be at least 4 years before the organization is far enough along on any process to consider advanced AI. (For a mid-size, this journey can be reduced to 6 years, and then it’s 3 years before Procurement is ready for advanced AI. It’s always People, Process, and Data before AI!)