In a couple of weeks, I’ll share with those leaders who are attending Ovation, Procurement Leaders’ CPO-only executive retreat, the details of our second speaker.
That individual – and there’ll be no spoiler here – will add to an agenda designed to tackle some of the big issues of the day. We’ll cover geopolitics, we’ll look at artificial intelligence, and we’ll spend plenty of time exploring resilience, too.
But, with a theme of Creative fuel, visionary futures, we will be deliberate in creating time and space for CPOs to ideate and innovate about the future – and how they, as humans, will fit into it.
As a result, a significant amount of our time together will be spent reminding ourselves of the uniquely human qualities we must strengthen if we are to prosper and remain relevant.
Helping us to address some of this will be the president and vice chancellor of the London School of Economics, Larry Kramer, but we will also bring someone with a more obvious creative streak to help expand minds and challenge thinking.
This led me to reach out to the CEOs of some creative agencies, whose work overlaps and engages with the corporate world, but isn’t always understood, appreciated or valued by the harder-nosed, margin-obsessed capitalists among us.
One of those who responded was, let’s just say, amusing. “I must admit, my experience is that the day procurement leaders take a real interest in creativity would be the day hell freezes over. So, I am intrigued.”
My first reaction to the message, I must admit, was to laugh out loud, but not long after it made me pause and reflect. I know many CPOs who have a real and intense interest in the creative world, but I suppose our CEO was experiencing something different: procurement trying to account for creativity, to put a price and a return on investment on it. This is, after all, much harder than simply appreciating it.
While the function will certainly be home to a significant number of left brainers, I have a hunch that the future will increasingly demand more of the right hemisphere of the human brain.
So, while the ROI of creative spend is still very much a relevant issue for procurement, another of increasing importance is how creativity and lateral thinking will form a growing part of the future procurement professional’s skill set.
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