Category Archives: Talent

Are You Prepared for a Transient-Advantage Economy?

In our three-part series this week on The End of Competitive Advantage, we described the reality facing many companies in industries where the concept of a sustainable competitive advantage has went the way of the dodo. We also noted that for these companies to survive, they had to learn to adapt to a new model where they competed in arenas, built up and tore down opportunity teams as the need arose, and gave up on the classical idea of persistent organizational structure. However, what we didn’t note was what it meant for you.

The last chapter of Rita Gunther McGrath’s book addressed the issue of what transient advantage means for you, personally, and it’s probably the most important chapter of the book for those of you where your working world is turning upside down.

What it means for you is that if you cannot adapt, you are vulnerable to losing not only your job, but your livelihood as your job might disappear. It happens. When was the last time you saw an elevator operator OUTSIDE of a classic-era hollywood movie? In order to help you figure out if you are vulnerable, and your level of vulnerability, the chapter presents you with 10 questions. If you answer no to any of them, you have some degree of vulnerability. If you answer no to five or more, look out – as the times they are a-changin’ for you!

If my current employer let me go, it would be relatively easy for me to find a similar role in another organization for equivalent compensation.
If the demand for your job is shrinking, then it might be the market is shrinking, or going away entirely, like the demand for physical film.

If I lost my job today, I am well prepared and know immediately what I would do next.
Even if you’re in the perfect job, are secure in that job, and have nothing to fear – disruptive innovations that eliminate entire industries pop up more often than you think.

I’ve worked in some meaningful capacity with at least five different organizations within the last two years.
This doesn’t have to be five different companies, but could be five different departments in your company. Adaptability is key.

I’ve learned a meaningful new skill that I didn’t have before in the last two years, whether it is work related or not.
The world is changing faster and faster and data is being produced at an unparalleled rate. A recent EMC study projects a nearly 45-Fold annual data growth rate by 2020. If you are not attempting to keep up, you will not keep up.

I’ve attended a course or training program within the last two years, either in person or virtually.
Training and education can expedite your learning process.

I could name, off the top of my head, at least ten people who would be good leads for new opportunities.
Networking is more than making, and poking, friends on Facebook.

I actively engage with at least two professional or personal networks.
Just like sole source is a recipe for supply chain disaster, a single focus could trap you in a dead-end network.

I have enough resources that I could take the time to retrain, work for a small salary, or volunteer in order to get access to a new opportunity.
Given the average amount of time to find a new job today, you should have a six month buffer. Just in case.

I can make income from a variety of activities, not just my salary.
If salaries are going away, you better have other options.

I am able to relocate or travel to find new opportunities.
You may not have to relocate permanently, but it’s a dynamic, shifting world, migrating to not just cities, but mega regions. As Richard Florida noted in Who’s Your City, talent, innovation, and creativity — are not distributed evenly across the global economy. They concentrate in specific locations. You may need to be there, at least for a time.

Now, if you answered yes to all ten (10) of these, and you aren’t already working in Supply Management – you should be, as this fits the profile of a go-getter up-and-coming Supply Management Professional. Source on!

For Lasting Results, Follow the Procurement Leaders … (Repost)

… but be sure to focus on the right characteristics first.


I posted this a year ago today, and I’m reposting because nothing has changed. This is still the right methodology, and, more importantly, the message has not sunk in yet at a large number of companies. The first three steps are absolute.

Reviewing a recent summary of A.T. Kearney’s 2011 “Assessment of Excellence in Procurement Study” over on the A.T. Kearney site on why you should “Follow the Procurement Leaders” that described seven ways to lasting results, I couldn’t help but notice that they had all the right suggestions, but in reverse order. Starting from the bottom of the list, and working our way up, we see that the suggestions will transform your organization from an average performer to best in class.

  1. Win the “War for Talent”.
    This is the first T necessary for supply chain success and the most critical one. No supply chain function can be happen without someone in place to plan, manage, and execute it — and for any function to be planned, managed, and executed in an optimal manner, you need world-class talent.
  2. Adopt Technology.
    This is the second T necessary for supply chain success and the next most critical one. Once you have found the right talent to take your supply chain to the next level, you need to enable your talent with the right technology to make them as efficient and effective as possible.
  3. Transition to Category Strategies.
    As the article notes leading procurement organizations use more advanced toolkits — systematically employing more than twice as many methods as the followers — to tailor their approaches to each situation. That’s why leading e-Sourcing / e-Procurement providers are now offering platforms with category templates / workflow management capabilities to allow platform customization to each organizational category and support the third T of supply chain success.
  4. Use Supplier Relationship Management.
    Suppliers are key to supply chain success, and leaders manage the relationship to get the most out of it. They use suppliers to improve innovation and growth, monitor compliance and risk management, and improve capabilities across the supply chain.
  5. Manage Risk Systematically.
    Leaders use risk-impact analysis, financial risk management, and disaster planning as ways to protect against, and mitigate the effects, of disruptions — unlike the risk management “followers” that constitute 80% of companies that are a single natural disaster away from a major supply disruption.
  6. Contribute to Top and Bottom Lines.
    It’s not just about cost reduction, but about value generation. Good Supply Management doesn’t just stop at cost reduction, but goes onto demand reduction, component innovation, product innovation, and even market innovation. This is done by managing risks, managing supplier relations, applying category strategies, using technology, and using all of the skills your talent possesses.
  7. Align with the Business.
    Leading supply management organizations support the business strategy. And while this is the most important goal from the viewpoint of Supply Management, as the goal is to increase the image of Supply Management in the organization, this can not be accomplished until all of the pieces of the puzzle, described in the first six steps, are in place.

Scandinavian and The Netherlands in the Creative Top Ten. Why?


Today’s guest post is from Gert van der Heijden, the Executive editor of Spendmatters.nl.

I just read the doctor‘s post on Sourcing Innovation (which I translated and posted on SpendMatters.nl) which noted that Scandinavia and The Netherlands are leading the world in creativity. The post, which referenced The Global Creativity Index, ranked 82 nations on their alignment between Technology, Talent and Tolerance to determine that Sweden was first, Finland was third, Denmark was fourth, Norway was eighth, and The Netherlands were tenth. While I have to admit that (being a Dutch bloke), as The Netherlands only came in tenth while the real Scandinavian countries were three of the top four, I shouldn’t be too proud of the Dutch, the next thought that came to my mind was the question of whether or not I believed the conclusions were right. So I looked at my field of expertise, the (small) world of sourcing and procurement and discovered these facts:

  • Science: In the Netherlands there are 6 professors in Supply Management
  • Publishing: A significant percentage of the scientific papers for the world wide IPSERA conference on Sourcing & Procurement were from individuals with a Nordic/Dutch background
  • Software: In Europe there are a lot of (e-)Sourcing Software providers, but some of the main players, like Basware and Tradeshift, come from the Nordics
  • Associations: Nevi is the third largest Professional Procurement Organization (after ISM and CIPS) in the world

Does this prove anything? I don’t think it really proves anything, but I have to admit that there should be a good reason why, for instance, our professional development is high in relatively small countries (Sweden 8.9 million, Norway 4.4 million, Finland 5.2 million and Netherlands 16.2 million), compared to surrounding countries that are much bigger (Germany 80 million, France 60 million, Spain 40 million, and UK 60 million).

I see a lot of similarity between the people in these countries in the way we approach our colleagues, our superiors and others. We like to discuss everything and our goal is to get consensus before we act. We like to do things, because we want to and not because our superiors are telling us to. The open, direct and confronting way of doing business and having meetings takes us a lot of time. This really differentiates us from the more hierarchic Germans and the more polite Brits. Therein might lie the difference. The Nordics do not think hierarchically and are more tolerant. So yes, I do believe that a lot of creativity can be found here, but I also believe we need the people in North America to get the work done, otherwise we will just keep on talking in an effort to be more creative.


Thanks, Gert.

To Solve the Talent Crisis, Think Different!

We have a talent crisis across the board in Supply Management and Supply Chain. We shouldn’t have a talent crisis, but because of continual short-sightedness in industry and government, we do.

And at this point I should probably end the post because by now the average person who stumbles upon this post is probably screaming that it’s not our fault, because we value talent, we have great education systems, and we’re trying hard to fix it, etc. etc., but it is our fault. Why?

Every year we rank talent in the top 3 issues. And every year, as our hopes and dreams that strong growth and stability will return get slashed by reality, the first thing we do is cut the training budget. And then, when we realize that there’s too much to do with too little people, we cut professional development time and ask people to work overtime on tactical tasks that add nothing to their skill set. And the cycle continues. So, in the corporate world, we cause our own chaos.

And then, when we have millions of people out of work, with thousands willing to retrain for better jobs, we limit unemployment benefits and make it almost impossible to get money for professional and degree programs. And I’m not just talking scholarships or sponsored training, I’m talking loans that many of these people would be willing to take, and carry for years, just for the opportunity to acquire a skill set that will see them working again. So the government is doing nothing to actually fix the situation. Governments have to guarantee loans for education and they have to subsidize living costs for workers who need retraining if their future earning benefits will limit the ability to repay very high loans. But that’s another issue for another post.

The point that needs to be harped on is that, as an industry, we’ve created our own mess, and we perpetuate it every day. As the job of Supply Manager gets more and more demanding, the response I’m seeing is “We need a talented, educated, skilled individual with a Masters Degree in Supply Management, who speaks three languages, has experience with MRP, ERP, and best-of-breed technologies, has sourcing expertise in three categories across five verticals, has managed 100 Million dollar projects, is trained in negotiation, etc. etc. etc.”. And, in the end, we have a set of requirements that maybe 6 people in the world can fill because ( a) it’s way too much for one person and ( b) the company has never bothered to train anyone internally with even half the skills it wants.

If a company instead took care to appropriately define a set of reasonable job descriptions that would cover all the necessary skills, and then identified internal candidates and trained them for those positions, they would have half the battle solved. Then, if instead of looking for someone for the role who had all of the skills, looked for someone who has the education and experience to quickly learn all of the skills with the mentorship of the people trained internally and a few focussed professional development courses, I’m convinced half of our talent crunch issues would magically disappear over night. (The logistics half would still be an issue because we have the image problem associated with warehouse and trucking jobs in this economy. Because we don’t view those jobs as highly important and an honour to hold, as the Mexicans do [which is why I’m okay with giving them our trucking jobs], convincing people to even consider those jobs will continue to be difficult.)

And then, as this recent article over on the HBR network on how workers with disabilities solved Gitanjali Gems’ talent problem, we never take the time to realize that someone else’s island of misfit toys might actually be filled with the resources we need to do the job. Now, I agree with Charles’ that Supply Management has traditionally been the island of misfit toys in an organization, and that is a big problem, but the reality is that if someone is skilled in X when organization Z needs Y, that person will be a misfit toy in organization Z. The best candidates for a Supply Management job are often people in engineering, high tech, medicine, (bio) chemistry, etc. who know the details of the category that need to be sourced, and the challenges that are involved, but who are not necessarily the best people to be building the projects or doing research. Just like some of the best sales and marketing people in high tech are people with CS degrees who learned to code, figured out that they weren’t very good at it and/or didn’t like it very much, but that they understand inherently what could and could not be done and the relative amounts of effort different commitments to a customer would carry. In IT, many R&D misfits became marketing marvels.

In the case of Gitanjali Gems’, they needed cutters. This is a skill that takes training and time to acquire, and a big money commitment from an employer. So they need to find people with interest, aptitude, and loyalty, as they’d lose big financially if they lost people to the competition as soon as they reached their productive potential. So they looked to people with real disabilities, and found that the attrition rate was 10 times lower, the productivity was 30% higher, and the overall working atmosphere became one where people “felt good” when they went to work, making them want to work even more. In my book, this far outshadows the additional benefits they received from the government (which ends up paying about 15% of the salaries), and the good press they get for the initiative. Because the company found people who wanted to work, and gave those people the training and tools they needed to be successful, the people enjoyed working for the company, worked 30% more productively, and stayed around a lot longer. Which shows that the talent crunch is solvable, if you just get up and actually do something about it.

Can You Zig-Zag Your Way To the Top?

A recent article over on the ISM site on “Moving Lateral to Move Up” provides good food for thought on how to advance your Supply Management career and make your way to the C-suite. Taking into consideration that succeeding as a supply management professional means understanding how the complete supply chain works and how the systems all work together and that it is crucial to develop expertise and experience in purchasing, operations, logistics, material resource planning (MRP) applications, cost reduction, logistics and trade compliance if you want to work your way into the C-suite, the article suggests that one way to do this is to make a lateral move.

Specifically, it says that moving from director of procurement to director of planning may be a lateral move at the moment but will provide longer-term potential. Using the same logic, moving from director of planning to director of logistics and then from director of logistics to director of trade compliance will be a great boost to your supply management career and it won’t be long before you’re in the corner office. Right? Maybe. Maybe not. If you jump around from one director position to the other, you might find that you are pegged as a career middle manager (and the first on the list to board the B-Ark) because, if you had more potential, why didn’t you become a senior director or junior vice president. Experience, like education and knowledge, counts but so does career progression.

Now, if you moved from director of procurement to director of planning for a one year term to cover someone’s parental leave upon the request of a senior manager, as pointed out in the article, and then moved to a senior director of logistics, that would be a good thing. Management would see that you’re a team player, as you took over a role that needed to be filled, someone looking to expand their horizons, as you had three different roles, and, most importantly, someone who can progress up the corporate ladder.

But the article makes one good point, before you make a lateral move, you need to determine if it is the right one. So how do you do that? The advice the article gives can be condensed into the following check-list:

  • does it fit in with your long-term career goals,
  • are the skills and experienced valued by the organization(s) where you want to work,
  • has a senior leader in the company asked you to consider the role,
  • does the opportunity energize you, and
  • will you learn new skills.

And it’s definitely where you start, but don’t forget to ask

  • is it really the best option I have now,
  • have I been at the same level too long, and
  • what is my exit strategy?

the doctor believes that it is possible to quickly zig-zag your way up the corporate ladder, but only if you are really serious and smart about it. Not all lateral opportunities will be right, and staying at the same level too long could be used against you. It’s a balancing act, so be sure to take out the scales.