One of my favourite moments from last month’s Asia Pacific Procurement Congress occurred when Asahi CPO Tom Veit took to the stage in Singapore to deliver a presentation with his colleague, Naoki Nagahama.
Naoki-san’s official title at Asahi is liaison director – or, in other language, a business partner. He’s part of the connecting tissue between central procurement and the wider, highly complex group of Asahi businesses. Naoki-san is a translator, connector, facilitator and mediator.
His presence at the Congress was evidence of Tom’s strategic vision and pragmatism. Think big, but make sure you focus on the potential inhibitors to success. Ensuring that the business bought into this vision was perhaps the biggest potential blocker of all, so addressing this with the help of liaison directors and positioning them as a crucial part of the success story was – and is – smart.
Further evidence of that vision and pragmatism came through both the content of the presentation and the fact that Asahi went on to win the Asia Pacific Procurement Excellence Award later that day.
In the presentation, Tom and Naoki-san spent a significant amount of time sharing the progress they had made on procurement’s transformation – a programme structured around the seven ‘Ps’: people; processes; platforms; partnerships; planet; performance; and, most importantly, purpose.
It was an avalanche of content, but this focus on purpose was something they reiterated as being a crucial enabler. So what is Asahi procurement’s purpose? “To safeguard, unlock and deliver sustainable value for Asahi, people and the planet.” (Members can read more about the programme in a case study that the team put together)
But having been impressed by the scale of the project and the scope of the impact, my favourite moment came during Naoki-san’s concluding takeaways.
“Read the air,” he said. “What’s not said is often more important than what is.”
In Japanese culture, being able to read the air (“ba no kuuki wo yomu”) is a common concept and is seen as fundamental to the success of collaborative working.
Many of us might understand this to mean being empathetic to the needs and dynamics that others have. Personally, I would much rather ‘read the air’.
Maintain a growth mindset
I’m looking forward to hearing from Danone CPO Jean-Yves Krummenacher later this week as he joins our December CPO Connect Call to share how he has renewed the organisation’s supplier innovation programme, Partner for Growth.
With clear goals and ambitions, the programme is a key driver of impact and it will be a good reminder that CPOs should not lose sight of the opportunities of supplier-enabled innovation despite the ongoing demands of third-party risk, cost pressures, tightening regulation and looming tariffs.
Take time to give thanks
Whether or not you celebrated Thanksgiving these past few days, it’s worth spending some time to reflect on the successes of the last year and recognise those who deserve praise. It may only take a moment to offer this acknowledgement, but sometimes the smallest gestures can have the greatest impact.
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