The stakes are always high for procurement, but at mission-driven non-profits like the American Cancer Society, procurement is working to – quite literally – help save lives.
In this powerful fourth episode of “Buy: The Way…To Purposeful Procurement,” co-hosts Philip Ideson, Founder of Art of Procurement, and Rich Ham, CEO of Fine Tune, speak with Brian Kyle, Vice President of Supply Chain and Accounts Payable at the American Cancer Society, to explore what enterprise procurement can learn from mission-first organizations like ACS.
Brian shares the kind of transformative mindset shift that happens when you transition to a nonprofit environment where every donor dollar is stretched as far as it can possibly go to directly impact the cause – in this case, the fight against cancer.
He also explains how mission-driven environments create a kind of gravitational pull across the entire organization – suppliers included – where everyone is laser focused on the same set of goals and success metrics. Brian breaks down how this coalescence around a shared mission to help save millions of lives creates unprecedented levels of collaboration and collaborative decision making, engagement, trust, relationship building, and value beyond savings.
The procurement team at ACS represents the essence of purposeful procurement and offers a tangible example of practices and perspectives that even private businesses can adopt to elevate their impact and find purpose in their work.
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