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January 31 2025
Are You Ready to Proc-N-Roll?
In this inaugural episode of Proc-N-Roll, hosts Natasha, Zach, and Conrad share their unique journeys in the field with their diverse backgrounds and combined 70 years in procurement. They discuss the evolving relevance of procurement in today’s business landscape, emphasizing the need for strong leadership, continuous improvement, and a deep understanding of the organization’s financial goals. The hosts touch upon the importance of stakeholder engagement, internal “salesmanship,” and the need for procurement professionals to actively contribute to business success. This episode sets the stage for future discussions on leadership, best practices, and the ever-changing world of procurement.
Watch now or read the transcript below.
Transcript: Proc-N-Roll 01 | Are You Ready to Proc-N-Roll?
Conrad | Hello, everybody. Welcome to Proc-n-Roll, your guide to practical procurement. This is episode one. We come to you live with Natasha, the Pro CPO from IBM, McKesson, Salesforce, and most recently Nike. Zach, he’s the go-to expert for all things procurement. Mr. KPMG lives in London. As you can see, Natasha’s in the Bay Area and I am Conrad, self-proclaimed innovator. I started with paper PRs at Intel, Transformational CPO at Adobe and now founder and CEO of Graphite.
We join you with almost 70 years of practical procurement experience, so you should find that helpful. Here at Proc-n-Roll, we’ll discuss the latest and greatest trends and topics in procurement while talking through the cornerstones and key building blocks of procurement. Whether you’re new to procurement or a seasoned veteran, we’ll have the discussions that will elevate your thinking and keep you grounded in practical procurement and value.
Ultimately, your jobs, our jobs, and procurement really only exist for one purpose, and that is to enable business success of your organization. So let’s jump in and get going.
Natasha, how in the world did you find your way into procurement? I have this theory – nobody was born thinking, “Hey, I’m going to be a procurement pro.”
Natasha | I didn’t even find the way to procurement. Procurement found me. Like, how is it being in procurement for 25 years? You know, one day you wake up and you realize that you have no other place to go. Maybe when I was 10 years in, I was still trying to – I’m like, I like M&A, I like strategy. I’m going to deviate. I’m going to cheat on procurement and devote myself to another field. But you’re brought back. And then one day you wake up and you’re like, “I’ve been in this field for 25 years. I am a procurement nerd. I’m a procurement fan. I’m procurement evangelist.”
I moved to the States 28 years ago, took a year of English as a second language, kind of needed to learn at least an alphabet to get to the workplace and just started looking around. That was a position at Gap, just covering for a buyer who was moving on to another role. My first job was checking the accuracy of business cards. And as you know, people are very passionate about their business cards – God forbid there is an extra space between the letters! So that was my first job, 26 years ago. The rest is history. It’s my field. I love it and I stick by it.
Zach | You’ve done amazingly though, Natasha. Because you’ve been CPO of so many different companies by now. Maybe you want to tell people a little bit about some of the different organizations you work for?
Natasha | I actually have been a formal CPO just once at Nike. Before that, I was vice president of services sourcing organization and category management at Salesforce. I was running strategic sourcing group at McKesson before that. So different, very different industries. And before that, I was in consulting gigs with IBM and with Procurion, which is now Accenture, building procurement solutions for various clients.
A very cool job was when eBay acquired PayPal – they brought me in to build procurement organization for PayPal from scratch. The first job at The Gap was my longest one, like six and a half years. If you look at my CV, you would think that I don’t know how to hold a job. But in reality, when you are in procurement and your role is in transformation, you normally have a three, four-year rotation cycle.
Conrad | Zach, tell us about your journey into procurement.
Zach | I’ll just preface by saying, I won’t put myself in the same league as yourself and Natasha. You’re both CPOs. You make up most of those 70 years of experience that Conrad mentioned. I’ve got about 10.
I actually wanted to join consulting, and one of the consulting companies I applied for was Four Seat Associates, which is a small boutique in the UK. They specialized in procurement, so that’s how I fell into procurement. My first internship was with them. I thought I was doing consulting – I didn’t really have a clue what procurement was about. But I really enjoyed what I was doing.
I realized procurement had different elements to it – analytics, negotiations, relationships, dealing with hard numbers and driving real value. At the boutique, I worked a lot for smaller, mid-size organizations. Very often we were building procurement capability from scratch. But over time, I realized I also wanted to see the bigger corporate view. That’s when I joined KPMG to get that lateral lens.
Conrad | I have a degree in biochemistry and a business degree, and I had no idea what procurement was. I feel a little bit like both of your stories where it just kind of happened to me. I did an internship at Smuckers, the strawberry jam company down in Southern California. It was more about practicing my Spanish and trying to implement computer systems. I was on night shift, pulling strawberries off the conveyor belt for microscope tests. I got to eat the best looking strawberries all night long!
After that, someone in my MBA program – weirdly, it was my wife’s ex-boyfriend – said I would fit in really well at Intel because of their constructive confrontation value. I applied for a job and they dropped me in procurement. I had zero idea what it was, just like you guys.
At Intel we were doing purchase requisitions with paper – pink, white, yellow copies, like you’d find in some old mom and pop shop. That’s how we were doing purchase requisitions back in the mid-nineties. My passion has always been to make stuff work better at home, at work, wherever. I just sunk my teeth into the fact that procurement wasn’t working very well. There wasn’t access to data or tools. That’s now 30 years ago, and I’ve spent just about every day trying to figure out how to make purchasing work better.
Natasha | What’s sad and exciting at the same time is that the problems you were facing 30 years ago, a lot of our colleagues are facing them today. Somehow, even though our field is populated by people that are very passionate about making it better, the qualitative difference is not happening as quickly as we had hoped. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why many of us who’ve been in corporate for quite some time are leaving corporate and trying to find solutions that can serve not just one company, but can be replicated and bring benefits to more than one company at once.
Conrad | You know, it’s a little shocking when that realization hits you because you work so hard to make things better and you go out one door and into another and you find that sometimes even the organization that you think you transformed kind of slips back. You’re kind of holding this rock up on the hill and it just rolls back to where it was. But more often than not, you’ve made some lasting change and you turn into another organization and they’re kind of right back where you started before.
Is procurement more or less relevant now than it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago?
Natasha | I think it’s more relevant, but I don’t think it’s consistent. It’s not just inconsistent across different industries or companies, it’s even inconsistent within the same business entity. It depends on when the company is in its cycle of financial performance, maturity, expanding its geographic presence or service offering.
Companies at some point realize that they’ve been predominantly focusing on the top line. And yes, they need to have a process to pay invoices and issue contracts, but that’s just a small fraction – the purchasing function of procurement. When companies realize they’ve focused too long on the top line and not the bottom line, they find inefficiencies, lack of compliance, broken policies, and most importantly, unfriendly processes where stakeholders spend more energy trying to bypass the process than following it.
Then they realize that procurement is not just about spend – it’s about the experience that employees have doing their everyday job. When companies make that realization, the question becomes: are you participating or are you committed?
Zach | How do you achieve that consistent commitment then, Natasha? Does it come down to whoever heads up the function? They’re ultimately the stewards, right? Or is there something that you can almost embed – procurement’s roots in the business for the long run, no matter who’s at the helm?
Natasha | I think it’s a brilliant question, but may I suggest that we take it as a theme for our next talk? If we start peeling this onion, it’s actually a great conversation to have, but there are a lot of details that we’ll have to uncover.
Conrad | One of the things I really want to focus on in this podcast is leadership. How do you show up and how do you lead real, lasting, valuable change and valuable contribution to the organization?
Natasha | People don’t care if they don’t understand. I think that like 70 percent of the CPO role is to be in the department of internal sales. And it’s not really sales – it’s educating people. It doesn’t come down to the three people at the top. It comes down to working with all the stakeholders and peers across the environment, educating and really sharing how procurement can make their life easier and better.
You can’t achieve progress if you just go to the top and deliver a message. Even if your wish list gets fulfilled and you get a green light to drive the changes you want, you need to have your surrounding environment actually embrace the changes and be part of them.
Zach | I think Natasha covered it extremely well. Typically, what I see is procurement transformation is always driven off the back of some kind of driver. There’s a big cost challenge, or there’s an M&A that needs to happen, or the company wants to IPO and needs to show that its costs are under control. Risk is another big driver we see in financial services with regulatory requirements around third-party risk management. And believe it or not, another big driver is too many complaints – when there’s too much noise, too much of a bad experience for internal customers.
Conrad | There you have it. Procurement is relevant. We’ve been at it together for 70 years, but it still matters. The whole point of procurement is to enable business success for the organization. If we can’t do that, then we’re not relevant. If we can do that, we’re forever relevant.
Zach | Just one final thought – it’s really important to understand the business that you’re in as the leader of your procurement department. Make sure your team is invested in understanding what the business’s objectives are. What are the big initiatives going on? The onus is on you as the procurement manager to go to the business and tell them, “Here’s how I’m going to make your life easier.”
Natasha | How often do we train procurement people on understanding how the company makes money? Like where the revenue is coming from? If procurement people start understanding how companies make money, they can actually be very creative about their procurement solutions.
Conrad | We’re going to have thousands of hours of meaningful conversations together. One of the things I love the most is we’re all so different in like 45 dimensions. We’re all born in completely different parts of the world – our family, our culture, our religions, our work experience, what we’re doing today in our jobs – and it’s procurement that brought us together. We’re all super passionate about that.
This transcript has been edited for clarity while maintaining all substantive content