Passion with purpose
At the recent CIPS conference, Ellis Watson, a veteran CEO with an impressive CV, called for procurement practitioners to display passion in everything they do. “Step up and take your message out to the business,” was his plea. I’ve been thinking about this and reached the conclusion that passion is not enough.
Passion for what? For your profession? Not enough. For your ‘kitbag’ of procurement tools and templates? Not enough. Passion for your shiny new IT system that aggregates spend data and promotes contract compliance? Not enough either.
Indeed, Watson was particularly scathing about procurement technology, singling it out for attention as something of a distraction. Technology is not the answer he asserted; and I agree with him. No amount of technology will secure support and commitment from stakeholders unless it pushes their buttons.
It’s a familiar message, but procurement exists to serve the interests of the business, not itself. It is passion about the downstream impact of procurement’s contribution that is worth getting worked-up about.
Even then, it’s not enough. Passion is nothing without INTENTION. In the end, procurement and its stakeholders have to do things, preferably together. It is intention that gets people into a room together, to share experience, knowledge, insight and to enthusiastically engage in the creative process that results in workable strategies for categories, key relationships and those stakeholder-sponsored initiatives that aim to grow the top line. It is intention that turns a desire for greater value capture from the supply chain into concrete plans for action that are destined to deliver. And it is intention that transforms a key supplier relationship into one that delivers tangible value improvement, not the feel-good-factor.
You’ll know when procurement is fulfilling its purpose when stakeholders are beating a path to your door with intent to draw on your expertise to help them achieve their objectives. Operate with a passion for that and you might be on to something.
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I would suggest that people might want to just question what in life is worth being passionate about.
Procurement exist to serve the interests of the business, wider market, public and environment and because of the aforementioned it requires passion. Intention of procurement is defined as the best value for money in narrow, commercial sense and wider socio-ecological dimension of this still relatively young discipline. However I take the point that passion- as an emotionally charged quality, will need something to maintain the momentum, but this something is not an intention, it is an attention and it’s constant focus on well designed evaluation criteria of procurement process that makes difference.
Well…., one can question “what in life is worth being passionate about”, if one is not passionate about subject or object. Procurement is a very infuenceable tool and therefore it is this impact that procurement process might just possibly make to…SME, environment,demand, desires/…/ that make some people act with passion.
“Passion” is now a vile business-speak cliche
STOP USING IT
Is bitter and twisted passionate about the (mis-)use of the word ‘passion’by any chance?
A bit more passion for plain english would be nice.
Passion is the outcome of and demonstration of us directly meeting our personal values. That’s because our personal values are what determine what we are motivated towards and away from ie what we’re willing to do and not do.
We can and often do things we’re not directly motivated to do but in these instances I think the passion referred to is missing. So too the desire for taking action. Therefore what action comes about will be as a result of cohersion or perhaps indirect motivation via other values (e.g. security or money) ie we develop the sourcing strategy because it’s what pays our wages (e.g. value of security) not because we want to change how the business manages that category (e.g value of making a difference)? Those at the receiving end of the strategy will I’d suggest know the difference and respond accordingly.
So for me passion is what others experience when our values are directly aligned with what we do on a day to day basis. That is our values directly provide the motivation to engage our stakeholders, use best practice, make a difference to the business, listen to our stakeholders, put their objectives ahead of ours etc.
The problem for me is when we do jobs that don’t meet any of our personal values and therefore it’s an effort to undertake any action. That’s when passion is missing and that’s what stakeholders pick up. When we’re just doing a job to indirectly meet a value such as security then why would our stakeholders want to listen to us?
As Jason said…
Thanks for the considered responses. One thing is clear; mentioning ‘passion’ in your blog always gets a response.
The point I’d like to reiterate regarding passion is that it is meaningless unless it is underpinned by a specific set of actions that deliver real benefits to the organisation. Passion on its own doesn’t lead you anywhere. That’s why I disagree with Ellis Watson’s overly-simplistic plea for procurement people to be passionate.
The reference to ‘intention’ is a challenge to practitioners to be a whole lot clearer about how committed they are, AND what they’re actually going to do, to deliver those benefits. Experience tells me that people are reasonably good at determining a course of action; they’re just not that great at following through.