I have just spent two hours reading about trust and governance, the need for agile projects, the importance of collaboration. I’ve also been answering questions on how parties can best maintain alignment over a multi-year agreement and the role of optimism in ensuring success.

It’s great news that impact investment continues to grow, with latest estimates published by the Financial Times (April 1st, 2019) showing fund values are now more than $500bn.

Today, I’m feeling surprised. And a little disappointed. I thought that progress was happening at a greater pace than it is. The fact it is not is bad news for the commercial community and its ability to innovate.

There’s a lot of conversation about building commercial competence within organizations. Sometimes it is referred to as ‘business acumen’. The reason it is so important is that decisions need to be made faster, but they must take account of risks. So there is growing investment in programs that help the workforce operate with better judgment.

In recent years, the UK Government has shown tremendous ambition in its efforts to transform the delivery of public services. Today, it offers a salutary tale illustrating the importance of ensuring that vision is tempered by an understanding of reality.

I am amazed at how many people want an answer to this question. More than 350,000 have read my blog on this particular subject. Is it because they don’t know the answer, or perhaps want reassurance that they are doing the right things?

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.