All companies have been affected by the pandemic over the last year, but companies in the healthcare industry - like Kaiser Permanente - have felt the pressure and the change to their operating procedures more than most. Mary Beth Lang is the Chief Supply Chain and Procurement Officer at Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California.

In this conversation, Mary Beth tells Host Philip Ideson:

• The importance of understanding your suppliers’ supply chains: how they produce or secure volume, whether their demand is met by contracted demand or spot buys, and where they are reliant upon imports to fill orders
• How Kaiser Permanente revamped its procurement resources and became more agile during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• What Kaiser Permanente learned from the pandemic about its procurement processes and what will be changed in the future
• How the Kaiser Permanente procurement team plays an active role in helping drive community impact
• Tips on how procurement teams can leverage their spending efforts to support their communities through working with diverse suppliers

In the spring and summer of 2020, there were plenty of stories about professionals and teams rallying to get their jobs done while working remotely, in some cases even going above and beyond to achieve levels of performance that no one would have thought possible. As the pandemic stretches on, and reaches a second wave or additional shutdowns, widespread fatigue is starting to set in.

In this conversation, Tom tells Host Philip Ideson:

• How to be an effective leader while moving from an operational focus to one based on preserving and fostering employee engagement
• The social and lifestyle differences between employees that have been exacerbated and highlighted by the need to work from home in varied personal circumstances
• The critical role that authenticity and trust play in building professional relationships that are strong enough to overcome situations when people are not okay

Casey’s General Stores is the 5th largest convenience store chain in the United States and owns one of the largest pizza brands in the nation. With 2,200 locations in 16 midwestern states, they have $10 Billion in revenue and a double-digit growth rate. What wasn’t going well for Casey’s? They had no procurement team.

When a new CEO came in, one of the first things he did was to bring in Jaime Robles as his Vice President of Procurement and Sourcing. With a career of successes in procurement team building and transformation, he was uniquely qualified to build Casey’s brand new procurement organization from scratch.

In this podcast, Jaime tells Host Philip Ideson:

• What he sees as the top two factors in procurement’s evolution over the last decade
• How he achieves a balance between procurement talent and technology
• What he believes procurement should be doing other than strategic sourcing

Despite the fact that Jan Griffiths has had a successful career as a tier-1 CPO and entrepreneur, she still wasn’t prepared for the personal and professional impact of the pandemic. After indulging in a full day of Netflix, she decided to push herself out of her comfort zone and into a non-judgemental accountability project with a pop-up group of peers.

What started as a ‘therapeutic’ accountability clinic evolved over time to become the accountability lab: a group of people that connect daily for 30 minutes at 6:30 a.m. to make commitments to themselves in the supportive presence of others. The learnings from this experiment have changed the way she feels about her own situation and will no doubt impact her leadership seminars going forward. As Jan tells Host Philip Ideson, “I love, love, love leadership.”

In this conversation, Jan shares her candid perspective on:

• The power of incremental change, whether it includes improvement over time or small course corrections
• Why procurement needs to change their approach to goal setting before they can increase their impact on the enterprise
• The rallying impact of having a brand identity at the functional level, and the need to ensure that the brand aligns with company objectives