Take Some Advice From Procurement’s Top Influencers

Don’t cry because it’s over…. Smile because you can re-live all of the action from The Big Ideas Summit Chicago on Procurious! 

ChristianChan/Shutterstock.com

The event might be over, but you can still  register for The Big Ideas Summit Chicago to access footage  from the event. 

Last week, Procurious gathered 50 of the U.S.’s top procurement and supply chain influencers in Chicago for the Big Ideas Summit for a day of rich discussion on the trends impacting our industry.

We debated whether entrepreneurial skills are something we’re born with or something we can teach…

We learnt why procurement pros must become better intelligence gatherers in preparation for the disruptive forces coming our way in 2018…

And we discovered that it’s possible to engineer moments of serendpity to ensure we meet the right people at the right time!

Couldn’t join us on the day?

Did we slip your mind? No problem! The Big Ideas Summit itself might be over but the global brainstorm continues on Procurious. There’s heaps more content to get your teeth stuck into via the learning area and in our Big Ideas Summit Chicago Digital Delgate Group.

Here’s a taster of some the content you can expect…

Everyone’s A Little Bit Entrepreneurial

Nina Vaca, The Chairman and CEO of Pinnacle Group has experienced a roller-coaster of ups and downs in her 20-year journey from a niche IT business, that was started on her living room floor, to the workforce solutions powerhouse it is today.

She offered some fascinating insights in to her life as a successful entrepreneur and asked us to think of entrpreneurship as a continuum, and not as a noun.

Everyone, Nina believes, has a little bit of entrepreneurial skill. Whilst your position on the entrepreneurial scale whether it be 5, 50 or 100 determines your overall potential, we can all move forward in our abilities to some extent!

Nina also provided some advice on how to spot entrepreneurial qualities during an interview process. How do you identify the visionaries, the ones with fire in their belly who will galvanise the people around them. Find out more below:

Can We Speed Up Real Life?

Greg Lindsay, Futurist, Urbanist, Journalist and Author, is a firm believer in the fact that innovation is fundamentally social. Indeed, case study after case study has demonstrated that the best ideas are more likely to arise from a casual chat around the water fountain than in any scheduled meeting.

So how do we engineer serendipidous moments. Of course, as Greg acknowledged at last week’s event, this is an oxymoron. But it is possible to create the conditions for unplanned encounters with people where ideas can happen. How do you meet the person in the office you should be working with, how do you meet people in the same social speheres you are yet to encounter?

Greg’s presentation was all about accelerating the experience of life, which is all about unplanned encounters. They happen all the time anyway, so the trick is to figure out how we can bend them to our will? Learn more in Greg’s video interview:

You Have All The Info You Need. Now, What To Do With It All…?

Justin Crump, CEO at Sibylline thinks that every procurement leader needs to become a better intelligence gatherer.  Given the rate at which technology is evolving and how global events are impacting the world, it is increasingly difficult for companies to keep-up without considering risk in real-time. Intelligence about the world we live in drives business operations and the better informed we are the easier it is to drive progress.

Justin explained that procurement teams need an effective process to managing the information they have and turning it into something they can use, what he terms an “actionable insight”.

In the past it was hard to get hold of information and now we’re swamped with it with the advent of social media – the challenge is pulling it al together.  In his video, Justin offers some advice on how to do this and outlines the disruptive forces are heading our way in 2018?

Want to see more from The Big Ideas Summit Chicago.  Register now  (It’s FREE!) as a digital delegate to gain access to all of the day’s action including video interviews with our speakers and attendees.