Is your organization on the path to commercial excellence? McKinsey, the global strategic consultants, are just the latest to grasp the critical role that commercial competence plays in delivering performance and growth. In a recent article, they observe that leading organizations ‘are now using superior execution rather than better offerings to outperform incumbents and drive growth’.

Marketing versus Procurement, Sales versus Procurement, the business versus Procurement … If you pay attention to the headlines coming from many Procurement trade bodies and associations, you would think that every day for the average Procurement Department is a battle.

A recent item on LinkedIn introduced the concept of a “pre-mortem” in decision-making. It suggested the need to explore the impact of an idea in advance – “one set of thinking is to explore if the project is a complete success, the other to explore the impact if the change made is a total failure. Imagine if Volkswagen had done a “pre-mortem” on their “cheat device” engineering? If Facebook had explored failure scenarios with sharing data with third party apps? If Wells Fargo had examined the operational impact of bonuses for new accounts? What if the moon mission in the 1960s had explored failure? Oh wait…they did. In fact, NASA is probably one of the more principled decision making bodies to examine countless “failure scenarios” and adjusting processes to reduce probability of negative events.”

Suppliers understandably complain about the unreasonable terms and narrow evaluation methods used by some of their customers. They are often right to point at the failures that result from such behavior, when it results in incompetent and sometimes dishonest suppliers winning business that they have no chance of performing, or the burden of risk promotes an adversarial relationship.

In recent years, there has been a steady push for increased collaboration. Businesses encourage it both wthin and between functions and with customers and suppliers. A survey by the Financial Times discovered that employers value graduates who have ‘the ability to work in a team, to work with a wide variety of people and to expand their network’. These were, in fact, the three top characteristics.

According to a recent report, almost 14% of the UK’s law graduates who move straight into employment are working as waiters or bar staff. That probably doesn’t reflect the aspirations they had when they started in law school, nor of course where their career will ultimately take them.

In a recent blog, I highlighted the importance of a proactive approach to contract and commercial digitization. Many still hesitate – they want to know what benefits it will bring, they say they can’t obtain funding, they even ask ‘what is digitization?’. So I promised a series of case studies and this is the second of them. The core message: if you hesitate, you will have been left behind.

There is a growing movement for transparency in contracting. Organizations such as the Center for Global Development and the Open Government Partnership are at the forefront. IACCM is a contributor and strong supporter of this work since it is fundamental to our mission of ‘improving the quality and integrity of trading relationships’.

“Memorial Sloan Kettering is in turmoil over a deal officials made to share cancer patient data with a for-profit artificial intelligence start-up.”

Although senior managers understand that contracts are important, most do not grasp the challenges – or potential contribution – that are associated with contract management. On the surface, it seems such an obvious and straight-forward activity – and therefore struggles to gain investment.