Archive for the 'Vendor Management' Category

Extended Payment Terms, Europe’s Decline, and Spend Management

While I was just accused the other week of being a Francophile because of my enthusiasm for French wines — and perhaps because of my anger that the socialist food Nazis in Chicago are banning the sale of Fois Gras — when I read articles like this, I’ve got to say that I could never […]

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HireVue responds to my Prescriptive RFT post

A few weeks ago, I used HireVue, a software vendor producing a video interviewing system, as an example of an overly-prescriptive vendor/candidate selection mechanism. Because my knowledge of the system comes from Vinnie Mirchandani's blog rather than first-hand use, I lead my post with the following paragraph:
"I'm going to gloss over many of the subtleties […]

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Dave Stephens’ new venture

Dave Stephens' new venture has been greeted skeptically by Jason Busch.
Jason writes "I wish Dave the best of luck in his new gig, but I have more questions at this point than anything else, as I'm sure anyone would reading their rather spartan landing site and Dave's short announcement at Procurement Central.

there's a big difference […]

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Your second most valuable asset … apparently not

My previous post discussed the importance of maintaining your reputation as a credible purchasing organisation. I would also rank highly the importance of maintaining your reputation as a credible contracting organisation, but I would, apparently, be wrong.
The State Government of New South Wales (Australia's most populous state) is currently embroiled in a dispute with its […]

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Your most valuable asset

Your procurement department’s most valuable asset is not its people, technology or processes, but its credibility. You can increase resourcing, upgrade technology and implement new processes by throwing money at the problems, but regaining your lost credibility is far more difficult and potentially far more costly.
Imagine you run a small procurement department managing $200 million […]

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Predicting relationship failure

John Gottman’s research on predicting interpersonal relationship failure should resonate with vendor managers. Gottman’s team, profiled in the Australian Financial Review and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, has identified four traits that, if present, indicate that the relationship has an 85% chance of failure. The odds of failure increase to 97.5% if one party's attempts to repair […]

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Blue Ocean Strategy and The Tawny Scrawny Lion

I’m at home this morning looking after my 2 year old daughter who’s too ill to go to child care. My wife will be spelling me off this afternoon whilst I go see a client.
Inspired by Justin Sullivan’s article on benchmarking diapers (Thanks for pointer, Jason), I’ve decided to share the Blue Ocean Strategy […]

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The end of American hegemony?

The current financial crisis has created a media conflagration that feels like a combination of the bird flu epidemic coverage in 2004 and the OJ Simpson trial coverage in 1994. So hot has the media fire burned that OJ was found guilty last week of a subsequent crime and received almost no coverage at all.
The […]

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The end of the credit crisis, the beginning of the environmental crisis

In this post I’m going to make two predictions: the first is bold (the credit crisis is over), the second is cynical (interests hostile to significant action on cutting/valuing carbon emissions will use the crisis to delay action).
Firstly, the credit crisis is over and I believe the recovery will be far faster than the experts […]

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Poll - Will the credit crisis delay environmental initiatives?

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