Strategic Procurement: Beyond Efficiency in an Age of Disruption with Paul Noël

The supply chains that gave you thirty years of competitive advantage are now your greatest vulnerability. So what do you build instead?

From the humanoid robot games in Beijing as a signal of shifting industrial capability to using Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers model to explain why the world is catching leaders off guard, ⁠Dean van Leeuwen⁠ and ⁠Graeme Codrington explore how the slow-moving parts of the system - infrastructure, governance, the natural environment - are now changing as fast as fashion.

This month's guest is Paul Noel, chairman of Achilles US & Canada, with an on-the-ground view of where US businesses are most exposed right now and the question most organisations aren’t asking: not how do we optimise our supply chains, but how do we make them resilient enough to survive a world where the underlying assumptions - frictionless transport, stable geopolitics, low tariffs - have disappeared.

Paul also explains why vertical integration is making a quiet comeback, how data centres have become a perfect microcosm of modern supply chain risk, and the three questions he’d ask any CEO to find out whether their supply chain is genuinely resilient - starting with: do you know your head of procurement’s name?

You’ll take away:  

• Efficiency optimisation has become fragility - the model needs rebuilding around resilience

•  Your biggest blind spots are where you stopped looking - beyond tier one 

•  Procurement must be a board-level conversation before it becomes a crisis

This episode explores:

The Big Squeeze, Angry Planet, and Multipolarity - three of the seven grey elephants we track at TomorrowToday Global.

The Elephant You Could Name:

When was the last time your organisation retired someone whose wisdom you couldn’t afford to lose?