Coming back to Procurement Mojo ten or so months after my first reading, I remember the experience of reading it, rather than the detail. I remember the number of times I said (out loud) Yes! Exactly! And the number of times I felt the desire to just email one of my ex-managers and say: does this remind you of anything?
Fortunately, I was reading alone in a hotel room (so I was spared the embarrassment of talking to myself) and I was out of internet contact so my mentor was also spared repeated pointless emails. But what this does tell us right away is that the book is an easy read and more importantly it is highly relevant.
With my own life slightly more under control, I’ve come back to read it again and make good on the overdue commitment to review.
Sigi’s intro tells us his personal story of coming to the UK as an impoverished immigrant and finding his first job mopping floors, and how 14 years later he was appointed as a procurement director at Marconi. That’s some trajectory – so evidently someone worth listening to. He tells us that the most important thing in any career is effectiveness which he describes as doing the right things.
He then moves on to explain that the second critical dimension in any business is the people dimension, and this is the one most overlooked. As he puts it (bearing in mind this isn’t a general business text - it is aimed specifically at procurement folk) “many Procurement functions today struggle with three critical challenges, all people-related: effective functional leadership; skills and competency of purchasing staff; and sub-optimal stakeholder relationships.” Yes, yes and yes.
By the way, he treats a certain level of ambition as a given. You’re not going to get anywhere without personal drive.
He sets out his stall early on. Acknowledging the frustrations faced by procurement teams, he quotes an unidentified purchasing manager’s blog lamenting “Why should I have to constantly fight to be allowed to do my job?” – a feeling with which I totally identify – but counters with a reminder that we have to take our share of responsibility for this. He asks: “would you show up to a gunfight with a knife?” A certain Indiana Jones scene comes to mind. The point is: don’t moan about the circumstances, understand what they are, be prepared for them and deal with them.
One key problem, he says, is that procurement is still too focussed on the numbers, the efficiency of the team, rather than the value, the effectiveness of the team. Procurement Mojo isn’t about how to do procurement; it’s about how to make the procurement you do effective from the organisational perspective.
Sigi also got a quiet easy vote from me for simply stepping back from the pointless semantic debate around what we call things and, as he puts it, the seeming identity crisis within the profession. Let’s be honest if we can’t get past that we don’t deserve to be at the top table. He takes the simple route of using procurement to describe the functional entity or department and purchasing or supply management (interchangeably) to refer to the activity. Simple. Move on.
We get reminders of a few fundamentals that perhaps don’t get sold well enough in many organisations: that our suppliers are “extensions of our organisations. If the suppliers are sub-standard, so will our organisation become”; that sourcing from distant regions may be good for costs, but increases risk, and (obviously) that procurement activity does directly affect the bottom line “irrespective of the squabbles…with budget holders and Finance.” That’s before we even get to the increasing importance of ethics and CSR.
These are sold so poorly in fact that according to his sources “almost 40% of finance directors view Procurement’s influence as detrimental or, at best, neutral” and that “people outside the function often feel that dealing with Procurement is exasperating.” My ten years in public sector procurement certainly find that as no surprise – but having listened to many colleagues (not all, but a significant number) seek to shift responsibility outside of the function, I also applaud Sigi’s conclusion that actually these “perceptions constitute a damning indictment to us in the purchasing profession”. If we want people to look at us differently: surely we have to BE different? It’s up to us to fix this. It’s up to us to find our Procurement Mojo.
To be fair, it’s not all doom and gloom and the text is well-leavened with success stories from around the world.
It would be wrong to share too much detail of what’s in the book (if you work in procurement you need to read it for yourself) but key messages include:
- Leadership: get it right. People won’t be motivated under poor leaders.
- Be clear on the function's objectives: sourcing & supply; spend management (contract management?) and supply base management.
- Measure the right things: if your measures focus only on the numbers then you won’t deliver on strategy or skills development or customer / supplier engagement – what do your attrition and attendance rates look like, what’s the CPD picture telling you? What about motivation – have you got the right people or would some of them be happier elsewhere?
- Make sure your processes, systems and tools are fit for purpose – and use the right tool for the job it’s intended.
- Remember systems don’t deliver outcomes: people do – so develop your people and make sure they are also fit for purpose.
- Manage the supply base robustly – not everyone has the same agenda.
- Remember that some goals will conflict – work out the priorities and weight accordingly.
- Don’t allow power play and posturing: have succinct & robust project management.
- Hold everyone to account….and
- …manage the Procurement brand – sell the value.
In amongst it there is a lot on the core stuff we should all know by now: SMART targets, Stakeholder Mapping, Risk management and so on.
Every section ends with Some things to think about: questions to ask of yourself and your organisation, so although it’s not written as a workbook, it could easily be used as one. Maybe take one or two of these out and use them with your teams?
I’ve said often that how much I love a book can be gathered by two things: how many corners I’ve turned down (sadly I got this one electronically, so not immediately evident – just as well, it would probably be every other page) and how frequently I go around quoting it. A few more favourite quotes:
“As Abraham Lincoln is said to have put it: Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those of us he hustle. Waiting for your Procurement mojo to materialise without doing the right things to manifest it is like waiting for a ship at the airport.”
“You can’t draw water with a sieve.”
“The more stretching individual objectives are, the more performance increases, up to an optimum zone. Beyond that performance suffers as stretch becomes stress…”
“A process development effort must not become a democratic activity; ultimately someone, usually the process leader, must make key decisions on the process design”
“And adherence to defined processes should be rigorously enforced across the organisation, augmented by appropriate leadership behaviours.”
“Purchasing folks who take this cowboy approach…damage Procurement effectiveness. They must be recalibrated.”
“Don’t waste your time with suppliers you really should be getting rid of” but also “Some purchasing people hold such negative sentiments about external stakeholders you’d think they were the enemy”
I could go on…I probably shouldn’t. Just go buy the book. Read it. And implement the bits that your organisation needs. It’s a light easy read full of profound wisdom and the kind of common sense that we’d all say “Yes!” to, if we only stopped long enough to spot where it needs to be applied.
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Published in paperback by Management Books 2000 Ltd
ISBN-13: 978-1852527457
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