The candidate must have leadership experience in spend analytics *strategic sourcing *operational procurement *contract management/recovery
This experience should span multiple industries and technology platforms in complex, global environments. The candidate will be a “forward-thinker” who will advance our capabilities and increase the value proposition for our clients. This includes experience and thought leadership with emerging technologies and solutions in areas such as spend analytics, market intelligence, automation and blockchain. The candidate must have strong client-facing experience in a business process outsourcing role.
Responsibilities to Include
Leadership Product Development Thought Leadership Development
Sales Collateral Development Solution Development / Proposal Development
Technology Requirements Development Client Partner and Sales Training
Delivery Assurance Partnership
Required
Minimum of 10 years of experience, or equivalence, in a procurement role including OTC and F&A with extensive strategic governance sourcing experience and increasing levels of responsibility.
Experience in strategic procurement and governance within complex spend categories including but not limited to; large capital equipment, professional services
Strong negotiation skills.
The ability to interact with executives and stakeholders at all levels of organization and deliver effective presentations.
Proven ability to manage competing agendas and priorities, and translate complex information across internal and external audiences.
Skilled at coaching, mentoring and developing staff.
Familiarity, experience and comfort level working closely with third party providers, consultants and contracted resources.
Strong financial acumen with consultative, analytical and problem solving skills
Some knowledge of business process outsourcing practices and experience managing contracted service provider deliverables, timelines and outputs against SOW and established KPI’s.
Professional Skills
Thorough understanding of the supplier landscape and interpretation of market trends within the identified categories listed above.
Demonstrated success with clients
Ability to develop and frequently refresh category market intelligence and insight tools to support internal sourcing teams and educate external client stakeholders
Ability to apply insights to customer’s situation for meaningful impact
Ability to influence and persuade senior level stakeholders
Effective coaching skills and ability to develop others
Ability to adapt to the varied corporate cultures and organizational structures of our customers
Ability to interface with customers and suppliers via strong written and verbal communications skills
Existing positive relationships within industries related to the identified categories listed above.
Strong sourcing knowledge to be able to translate category to sourcing strategy
Well-developed, solution-oriented selling skills
Proven ability to work creatively and analytically in a problem-solving environment
Ability to drive transformational change
Solid multi-phase project management skills
Strong ability to effectively manage in a matrix organizational structure working with multiple internal stakeholders
Exceptional track record of building relationships with stakeholders or customers that have resulted in high customer satisfaction
If you are interested, or know someone who might be, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Larry Janis
Managing Partner I Integrated Search Solutions Group
By Helen Pitcher OBE, Chair of Advanced Boardroom Solutions
With more women as board chairs, business can better serve society.
Companies should benefit all their stakeholders. This is increasingly on the minds of regulators, activists, politicians, pension investors and individuals of this world. As Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of Blackrock, wrote in his 2019 Letter to CEOs, “society is increasingly looking to companies, both public and private, to address pressing social and economic issues”.
If we want boards to deliver benefits for a wider stakeholder group – and stop focusing on short-term profits – we need to shift the dial on women becoming chair of these boards. Failing that, the corporate landscape won’t change.
While there are excellent male chairs, too many are products of the old boys’ network. These men pay scant attention to their increasing accountability towards stakeholders beyond their shareholders. In the United Kingdom, the days of the Financial Reporting Council (the watchdog for auditors, accountants and actuaries) are now numbered after it was embroiled in one controversy too many.
Why more women chairs is a game changer
McKinsey & Company has a long history of published reports that have established the business case for diversity. Organisations with greater gender diversity outperform others, typically have a healthier risk profile and make better investment decisions. All of this generates greater client and customer satisfaction.
Based on peer-reviewed research, surveys and anecdotal evidence, we now know what makes an effective board chair. Beyond the obvious group of traits including integrity, personal strength, courage and intelligence, the critical skills are:
an ability to influence others without dominating
an engaged vision of the future
strong emotional intelligence
coaching skills.
If we schematise the skills of an effective chairperson, it may look like this:
At the base of the pyramid lie the rules-based, measurable hard skills. While they are necessary, they can be taught and learnt.
At the top of the pyramid, we find the intuition-based soft skills that require a high emotional quotient (EQ). Those skills can only be developed through experience, practice and internal focus.
EQ & soft skills are more often associated with women than men. Though differences between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ traits have little bearing on the attributes of individual men and women, research does not support the notion that men are somehow better suited to the chairperson role.
It should be clear that women are just as capable as men in directing and chairing our companies. Furthermore, they have as much right to succeed, and fail, as their male counterparts do. Our reservoir of chair talent is not so great that we can afford to ignore 50 percent of the potential candidates.
Time to accelerate the pace of change
As the leaders of our companies are called upon to strengthen their engagement with society and all stakeholders, we need to better understand and articulate what a chair role entails. The “job description” must move beyond the domineering CEO stereotype, with its descriptors of drive, ambition and ruthlessness.
The soft skills of facilitation, collaboration, listening, synthesising, defusing conflict and ensuring consensus are the hallmarks of a successful chair. At the other end of the spectrum, directive, overly assertive and antagonistic are the traits of an ineffective chair.
By acting as role models, women chairs can provide additional societal benefits. For instance, they can act as a driving force for empowerment and to promote the inclusion of a broader talent pool. In the UK, advocates of increased acceleration of women in chair roles are multiplying. They include existing female directors, the Women on Boards network, the International Women’s Forum (IWF), Men as Change Agents (MACA), the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the 30% Club.
While the positive pressure for more diverse boards does show results, the action on women chairs is far behind. Too many active resistors – including old-style chairmen and nomination committees – continue to reinforce the false idea that chairs must have at least a decade of board work under their belt. Head hunters tend to say that female chairs are difficult to find, repeating a narrative they used before national targets were established for women on boards. The statistics show this is not true.
Stopping the erosion of trust in business
We need a strong push to free boards held hostage by reductionist thinking. According to research by INSEAD Professor Stanislav Shekshnia, only 20 percent of boards in the UK will be women-led by 2027. This is not enough. It is time to take action to accelerate the acquisition of more female chairs, right across the public and private corporate environment.
In the UK, the new Combined Code with its cap of nine years of service on a single board will create more churn. Investment companies must start asking mediocre chairmen to step down. Women need a greater number of enthusiastic sponsors and more board-level development. I challenge more female directors to aim for the top role.
Having more women chairs will help rebuild the trust in our corporate environment and foster businesses that deliver performance mixed with social and environmental benefits. It may just be the key to a new era of sustainable long-term profit.
Helen Pitcher OBE (IDP-C) is the chair of Advanced Boardroom Excellence, which works with board effectiveness, board evaluation reviews and coaching chairs, CEOs and NEDs. She is a graduate of INSEAD’s International Director’s Programme.
The percentage of companies that report being data-driven is shrinking. According to a recent survey, 31% of firms surveyed say they are data-driven. That’s down from 32.4% in 2018 and 37.1% in 2017.
Meanwhile, 87.8% of executives report having a greater urgency to invest in data-driven initiatives. So, marketers are talking more about data, but we’re losing confidence in creating a data culture. The same study showed that 93% identify people and processes as obstacles to forming a data culture.
I find that this is true in both the commercial and nonprofit spaces.
Nonprofits have historically been resource-deficient compared to their commercial peers, anchored by public perceptions of overhead and waning trust in philanthropy. Add to this a trend of weakening retention of those who contribute to nonprofits, and data regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Now is the time for nonprofits to commit to forging a data culture, which starts with instituting a data governance construct. Here’s how:
1. Stop talking about big data. In fact, wipe out every data-related buzz term from your conference rooms and planning meetings. If you ask me, there’s no greater buzzkill to strategy than buzzwords.
2. Consider data your biggest business asset. For nonprofits, this means the data you have on those who have engaged with you — volunteered or donated — is central to your organizational value. This asset can help you to centralize data governance to strategically drive marketing efforts.
3. Create a data strategy task force. If you’re going to create a data culture, you must first seed the culture among key influencers. Start with a cross-functional team that can work together to build shared practices for data.
4. Identify your data management practices. Many organizations do not have documented data management practices or business rules. Instead, the rules live in a single employee’s documents or, even worse, a single employee’s head. Proactivity in identifying data management practices will help you break down silos and extend the shared practices so that everyone owns the processes and approach.
5. Build a road map for data management optimization. With documented practices built collaboratively, your task force will also likely identify areas of need. Support their work by putting resources against the areas of need. In other words, reinforce the commitment to data culture by funding optimizations that are well-planned.
6. Make data strategy the hero. Avoid common pitfalls for strategic planning, like founder’s syndrome, “we’ve always done it that way” thinking and pigeon-holing data as a function of your IT team. When data strategy is the hero, strategic planning includes a collaborative discussion on what data you’re going to measure, where you’re going to store the data and how you’re going to use this data for future marketing efforts.
7. Share. Workplace culture includes company vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs and habits. If your pursuit and goal is a data culture, simply put the word “data” in front of each of those elements: data values, data norms, data symbols and language, data habits. This isn’t a one-time side project. Forging a data culture is an iterative, behavioral commitment that requires constant collaboration and sharing.
There are plenty of resources to help you on your journey to forging a data culture. A few of my favorite resources include the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), which offers a free benchmarking assessment (RKD Group is a member of NTEN); Bloomerang, which offers free resources ranging from webinars to guides to help steer nonprofit data management practices; and content by Tom Davenport and members of the Stanford Social Innovation Review team that regularly offers insights about data, analytics and innovation in nonprofit marketing.
The Vice President Communications, Media and Entertainment Will have a team of 6-10 people (farmers and hunters) reporting into the individual. He/she will be managing a large existing portfolio as well as prospecting for new logos in the communications, media and entertainment space.
Responsibilities: Grow the Business: Drives sales opportunities to closure – increasingly selling a mix of defined solutions/extensions and new offerings or products into white space; wide range of service group offerings and deal structures
Develop Key Relationships: Develops and maintains strong relationships with key client buyers: the Divisional head/C-Suite level; client decision making spanning multiple layers of organization.
Services offered: They offer strategic Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) solutions that are tailored to help our customers across industries to run, change, and grow their businesses, while enhancing the end-user experience across channels.
Their strong consulting practice and technology expertise drive successful front, middle, and back office operations.
Experience:
10- 15 years’ experience in BPS business development in the communications, Media and Entertainment sector
Proven ability to develop new BPS business and meet quotas
Excellent communication skills and high level of maturity
Superior relationship management and networking skills for both internal and external customer/s
Excellent client handling skills, with ability to present and articulate various points of view
Ability to forge relationships across and throughout the internal organization
Personal Characteristics:
The ideal candidate is able to operate successfully in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. Energy, drive and an entrepreneurial spirit are necessary characteristics for success.
Strong and capable leader, able to win the confidence and trust of his/her team, shape the culture, and exert influence both internally and externally
Ability to establish immediate credibility among his/her peers, a professional who is respected for his/her leadership, intelligence and expertise
Superb negotiator and communicator
The role report to the President
If you are interested or know someone who might be, please let me know.
Larry Janis
Managing Partner I Integrated Search Solutions Group
The candidate must have leadership experience in spend analytics *strategic sourcing *operational procurement *contract management/recovery
By Justin McCord