A manual explains how business leaders can positively transform an organization’s procurement strategy.
According to Hustwick, a well-functioning procurement team can have a major impact on the overall operations of a company: “The leverage and impact a high-performing procurement team can have on an organisation are huge if the team has the right processes, technology and custody of its external spend.” In fact, successful procurement can increase a business’s overall competitiveness as well as its shareholder value. But procurement is often an undervalued part of a company, demoted to the third or fourth tier in a management structure and often considered a service provider rather than a fully integrated part of an organization’s priorities. The author furnishes a remarkably detailed plan for the transformation of a procurement team that begins with gaining the endorsement of the CEO and includes establishing an overarching strategy. Hustwick manages to condense a complex set of recommendations into an accessible plan, one represented by a “transformation wheel” that is subdivided into the six main target areas of procurement, including strategy, resources, executive sponsorship, process, technical skills and technology, and communication and reporting. The author’s analysis of procurement and its potential for transformation is impressively straightforward—his counsel is thorough but is presented in under 100 pages, often helpfully illustrated with various graphics. He covers an astonishing expanse of ground with great clarity—sourcing processes, cost reduction, and personnel, among many other subjects, and some issues are centrally significant today, like supply chain assurance. Hustwick’s expertise is never in doubt—his 25 years of experience at a major global corporation are evident on every page. This book will primarily be of interest to procurement specialists. But given the significance the author convincingly assigns to procurement, it should also be helpful to a general audience of business leaders.
A comprehensive and admirably unconventional guide to corporate procurement.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-228-86270-3
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Categories: BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | PSYCHOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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