INSPIRATION - IT ’ S ESSENTIAL ! they do and the other is purpose , so help them find a reason to do what they do . If I could crystallise everything that I ’ m saying about leadership into one word it would be : inspiration ; and that absolutely applies in procurement . They can be the kind of people who turn up and place orders and do a commodity task , or they can be the people who save the company .
“ A good buyer is worth a fortune to a big business , they are precious , precious people .”
Indeed , Alexander and his team will oversee a spend of something like $ 2.5bn in Europe , the Middle East and Africa , thus underlining how vital it is to ensure his buyers are at their best performance-wise .
But although it ’ s all very well saying what you need to do to make sure that the environment is conducive to optimising performance , how do you actually achieve it ?
It turns out that necessity was very much the mother of invention in this case , as some of Alexander ’ s best techniques were developed when the oil price crashed and wiped out BP ’ s training budget .
“ First of all , I think you need to
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