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accidental procurement
The strange paths that create great procurement leaders
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HI THERE
When I started writing this newsletter less than a year ago, I genuinely thought maybe a few hundred people might read it.
Maybe some old colleagues and a few procurement friends plus the occasional curious “lurker”.
As I write this, there are now 7,000 of you reading this every weeks and I am humbled by this number. I still find that slightly surreal that somehow this has turned into a global conversation with thousands of professionals who care about the same strange little corner of business that we do.
So thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
This edition also comes at a slightly strange moment for me personally as after more than two decades working inside various procurement roles, I’ve officially “quit” procurement as a job.
From early June I’ll be setting up shop on my own.
I’m not leaving the profession itself, if anything I expect to be even more immersed in it, but I’ll now be working independently on the projects I care most about: writing, teaching, building tools, and helping organisations think differently about how procurement actually creates value.
It feels a little terrifying (ok VERY terrifying) and a lot exciting at the same time!
In today’s main piece I wanted to explore something that has always fascinated me about our profession: how people actually end up in procurement in the first place.
Unlike most careers, almost nobody studies procurement with the intention of becoming a procurement leader. The best professionals I’ve worked with came from wildly different backgrounds and that’s what today’s article goes into.
And before we get into it, a quick heads-up for something I think many of you will enjoy.
This Thursday 12th of March I’m hosting a live webinar on AI in procurement with two people I have a lot of respect for: my awesome friend Tom Mills and Anders Lange, the cutting-edge CPO at DXC. Anders specifically has direct experience implementing a ton of AI use cases in his own organisation and knows all the pitfalls that come with it. As you know my experience is mostly of deploying applications in client environments. Tom looks at it from the soft skills required to thrive in this AI age. So overall we have a fantastic set of complementing skillsets for a well rounded view.
We’ll be sharing six practical tactics procurement teams can use right now to get ahead with AI, the real, practical applications we’re seeing inside organisations today.
You can register here if you’d like to join us.
Now, let’s get into it…
PROCUREMENT MISFITS

Most professions have a clear academic path.
Doctors study medicine like lawyers study law, accountants study accounting and engineers study engineering.
Procurement… well… procurement is where careers from other disciplines slowly and painfully wash up.
In the teams I have built over the past twenty years I’ve had people with degrees in economics, philosophy, politics, supply chain, business, and occasionally things that had absolutely nothing to do with any of it. And if I am honest, some of the best procurement professionals I’ve worked with didn’t start anywhere near procurement at all.
My own degree which I studied just before I landed my first procurement role was in Econometrics,
not exactly a perfect fit for the psychological realm that is Indirect Procurement.
My wonderful friend Tom Mills studied Geography yet had an incredible career as Head of Procurement for a number of organisations.
Similarly, my best ever hire I made was also good example, which came from recruitment.
On paper that should have made no sense and I have no idea how the CFO trusted me with it because recruitment and procurement sit in completely different functions and most hiring managers would have filtered her CV out before even speaking to her.
But when I met her it was obvious very quickly that the core skills were already there. Recruitment, at its heart, is about understanding incentives, reading people, negotiating expectations and managing relationships between two sides who both want something different… sound familiar?
Within a couple of years she wasn’t just performing well but even she replaced me in my role when I moved on and then later she was promoted again.
That experience made me seriously rethink something that most of our profession just seems to assumes: that the way you train people in procurement is through procurement qualifications.
I have a CIPS qualification (just Level 4, truth be told!). It can be useful for some and it absolutely has its place. It teaches the mechanics of procurement: sourcing processes, contracting fundamentals, supplier evaluation, governance, negotiation basics. If you want to learn procurement basics properly and you have no previous experience, it does that job well.
But being fully truthful with you, my MBA taught me more about procurement than CIPS ever did. Procurement leadership requires something different to procurement execution.
An MBA forces you to understand how a business actually works. You learn corporate strategy, financial analysis, organisational behaviour, market competition, and the uncomfortable reality that most decisions inside large organisations are driven as much by politics and incentives as they are by logic.
Those are exactly the things procurement leaders deal with every day.
CIPS might prepare you to become a good buyer but not necessarily prepare you to become a Chief Procurement Officer.
When you look at what great CPOs actually do, the skillset is very different from running tenders or negotiating contracts.
They influence executive teams who may not naturally see procurement as strategic.
They balance risk, resilience, innovation and cost across entire supply networks.
They design organisations, build teams and align procurement to corporate strategy rather than just savings targets.
Those are leadership capabilities, which they sit at the intersection of finance, strategy, psychology and influence.
And that brings me back to degrees.
If a young person asked me today what they should study in order to work in procurement, I’m not sure I would say “procurement”.
I might say economics. Or maybe psychology. Or business. Or even something that teaches you how organisations and markets actually behave, because procurement sits right in the middle of all of those things.
There’s also another dimension to this conversation that I find interesting.
Procurement has a large number of women in the profession. In many teams the gender balance is actually quite healthy at junior and mid-career levels. Yet when you look at the number of women who become Chief Procurement Officers in large organisations, the numbers are still noticeably smaller than they should be.
Part of that may be the same dynamic we see in other functions, I am sure.
Leadership pipelines often reward people who have broader commercial exposure, strategic visibility and executive influence. If early career procurement roles remain heavily operational, some talented professionals simply never get the exposure needed to move into those senior leadership conversations later.
Which brings us back again to the question of what actually prepares someone to lead procurement.
It might not be a procurement qualification at all but the ability to think commercially, understand power dynamics inside organisations, and translate procurement decisions into business strategy.
And sometimes those skills come from the most unexpected career paths.
Practical tips for building a CPO skillset
If you’re thinking about where your own career in procurement is heading, these are the capabilities that seem to matter most once you move beyond operational buying.
1. Learn finance properly
At senior levels, procurement discussions quickly become financial discussions. This is why so many CFOs end up being CEOs. You need to understand how savings flow into P&L, how capital expenditure works, and how procurement decisions affect margins, working capital and risk.
2. Study strategy, not just sourcing
Category strategies are useful, but what most executive teams I have worked with cared about was business strategy. The more you understand market structure, competitive advantage and supply market dynamics, the more relevant procurement becomes.
3. Develop influence skills
Many of the biggest procurement decisions are not won through process but through persuasion. Learning how to influence stakeholders, manage internal politics and build coalitions matters more than most sourcing textbooks admit.
4. Build experience outside procurement if you can
Exposure to operations, finance, product development or sales can dramatically improve your ability to think like a business leader rather than a functional specialist.
5. Hire for mindset, not just based procurement experience
Some of the best procurement professionals start somewhere else. Look for people who understand incentives, negotiation, relationships and commercial thinking. Those skills transfer surprisingly well.
Procurement is one of the few professions where people arrive through dozens of different paths.
That lack of a single “correct” route sometimes frustrates people early in their careers.
But the longer I work in this field, the more I suspect it’s actually one of our greatest strengths.
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Freebie(s) of the week

THE VALUE CREATION PACK
Very early in my career, I was in a Category Buyer/Consultant role in the mid-2000s. At the time I thought generating savings meant one single thing: negotiating harder.
If we could squeeze another 2% out of a supplier, we were doing a very good job.
That was my company’s entire playbook.
It took me a long time (and a few very humbling sourcing projects) to realise how incomplete that view actually was.
The biggest savings I’ve delivered in my whole career eventually never came from negotiating on price at all.
They came from things like changing the scope of a consulting contract, consolidating suppliers across regions, simplifying specifications that no one actually really needed (though I admit this is a hard sell!) or stopping the business from buying something in the first place.
Over time I started collecting these approaches almost like little mental tools and in every new role added a few more.
Eventually I realised I had a small framework in my head that I carried from job to job. The freebie in today’s issue is a version of that framework.
But I also know that knowing that savings just aren’t enough.
You still need a way to track them, defend them, and explain them to Finance.
That’s why I put together the Procurement Savings Toolkit.
It includes three things that solve the problems most procurement teams run into when they start reporting savings.
The first is a Savings Tracker and Dashboard.
This helps you capture initiatives in a structured way, calculate savings properly, and present them in a format that Finance and leadership can actually understand. Most teams track savings in messy spreadsheets that become impossible to explain later. This gives you a cleaner system.
The second piece is an Advanced Value Creation Guide for Indirect Procurement.
This explains the more sophisticated methodologies behind savings. Things like demand management, rate card optimisation, supplier consolidation, commercial model redesign and SaaS licence optimisation. These are the levers that experienced procurement teams rely on once they realise negotiation alone doesn’t really do the job.
The third piece is an Executive Procurement Dashboard.
This is the slide you wish you always had ready when someone senior asks: “So how much value is procurement actually delivering?” It turns a list of initiatives into something that makes sense to a CFO.
None of this appeared overnight for me. These techniques are the result of years of trial, mistakes, and learning what actually worked for me across different industries and categories.
If you’d like to use the toolkit yourself, you can download it below.
It’s free for subscribers to the Procurement Blueprint for the next 72 hours.
Do you want access to other great templates from previous newsletters? Have a look at the full store below:
That’s it for this week.
Before I go, a small preview of next week’s issue.
For only the second time since I started this newsletter, I’ve invited a guest writer. And I’m very glad the next one is Michael Shields, my wonderful friend and VP of Procurement for Tropic, who many of you would recognise instantly as one of those rare leaders who manages to be both commercially sharp and genuinely inspiring.
His piece is about something every procurement professional eventually runs into: getting real buy-in so your business changes behaviour.
Michael writes about why that’s so difficult in our function and, more importantly, how he has personally managed to solve it in practice. I read it earlier this week and thought it was excellent, so I’m very excited to share it with you.
I’ll leave you with a thought that feels particularly fitting after writing today’s piece about accidental careers and strange paths into procurement:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Procurement careers rarely follow the path we expect.
And perhaps that’s the point.
Until next time

Procurement worth reading.

