Browsing: Next Practices

I’m not a huge baseball fan, but my daughter gave me the book Moneyball (used at many leading business schools) by Michael Lewis and I was eager to see the movie. Brad Pitt takes a break from his jet-setting life with Angelina Jolie to play Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Billy Beane is well-known for fundamentally redefining the way baseball teams make decisions and challenging the way teams had been managed for over a century. He essentially changes the decision criteria used to select players to a much more fact-based model, which focuses on the real value the players bring toward the Intended Consequences (getting a win). Once he redesigns the consonants (People, Process, Technology), he quickly realizes that getting to the expected results is still far away. It’s not until he focuses on the vowels (Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization and Utilization) that the results start showing up. The constraints he faces should sound very, very familiar to everyone. Follow the trail and tell me if you agree that we all need to be a Brad Pitt (no that does not come with Angelina Jolie).

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This was a gathering of various Presidents of the ISM and NAPM regional chapters and they were gathered together in that capacity. They were trying to figure out how to become more relevant for their regional markets and their customer was the entire Procurement, Sourcing and Supply Chain community of that region. I decided to give them a perspective of their market based on a lot of the research that we have done and provided them with the proverbial Top Ten list (in no particular order).

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One of my favorite presentations of the day was delivered by Alistair Donald, the Chief Procurement Officer of Global Procurement Services of ConocoPhillips Company. Alistair’s presentation had a James Bond / Secret Agent theme which made it very entertaining as well as informative. Alistair has a wonderful story to tell of his success in transforming the Supply Management function within ConocoPhillips. Michael Lamereaux from Sourcing Innovation, an NPX attendee, wrote that Supply Management has been a key contributor to ConocoPhillips’ financial success over the last several years in his blog post, Supply Management: Secret Agent of Business Improvement (Key NPX Take Away 5) where he articulated Alistair’s value contributors.

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Obama challenged America to create “Sputnik” moments where new innovation would break through historical obstacles. “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” was Obama’s battle cry to action.

Now is an excellent time to apply that same “State of the Union” thinking to our Supply Chain relationships. How can we create internal “Sputnik” moments with our employees? Who in our organization owns this role? Do we encourage or discourage our suppliers and customers from innovating? How do we even begin?

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A few weeks ago, the famous Washington Post White House author, Bob Woodward wrote an article entitled “Military thwarted president seeking choice in Afghanistan” which was all about the critical nature of decision making. What greater decision can there be then deciding the fate of tens of thousands of young U.S. men and women as they are sent into war-torn Afghanistan? The article chronicles the process that President Barrack Obama undertook in finally deciding to send 30,000 additional troops as opposed to the 40,000 (which came highly recommended by his military leaders) in December 2009.

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