Our cover story this week features a true maverick of the procurement world…
It’s fair to say, Eugene Galdi, Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer at Arxada, does things a little differently from the traditional procurement professional.
“My first rule when I meet my new direct reports for the first time, is to review a long-stating policy I have,” he says. “I first ask them to put their phones on the table. I then tell them that during our meetings, if that phone rings or you get a text from family, if you do not answer it, you don’t have the correct culture to work for me. I tell them, that ‘Everybody knows you’re working. So, if your family is calling or sending you a message, it’s most likely they need to say something important.’ It is about understanding that work, while important, can’t always come first, and I want leadership who believe in that. I think Arxada’s culture exemplifies this.”
People first
Safe to say Galdi has a unique and refreshing leadership style. With a career involving roles with giants such as General Electric, Honeywell, 3M, and now Arxada, you could be forgiven for expecting Galdi to be solely company driven. However, as his previous anecdote demonstrated, quite the opposite is true. At his core, Galdi is fiercely people focused. According to Galdi, empowering underwhelming staff is all about identifying what makes them tick in order to ignite motivation and improve productivity.
Read the full story in CPOstrategy Magazine here.
ABM: Strategic procurement that keeps stakeholders in the driving seat
At any scale, under any circumstances, procurement is ultimately about relationships — the ones forged with suppliers, with partners, with stakeholders, and with colleagues.
Procurement: It’s all about the relationships
An organisation like facilities solutions provider ABM, where over 120,000 team members service more than 6 billion square feet of real estate every day — tackling everything from janitorial and sanitation tasks to HVAC maintenance, mechanical services, landscaping, transportation, and electrical infrastructure — is made up of hundreds of thousands of relationships. Ask Jamie Bilbrey, Director of Procurement at ABM, and he’s quick to assert the fact that relationships are at the heart of the procurement process at ABM. “If you ask me what I think you need the most to be a successful procurement person, the number one thing is the ability to build relationships,” he says. Whether dealing with compliance and risk management, any of ABM’s team members (from the C-Suite to front line operators), or its network of valued suppliers, Bilbrey stresses the fact that “you have to build the relationship.”
One relationship that Bilbrey has built over more than 17 years is his working partnership with ABM Chief Procurement Officer, Joe DeMarco. Long-standing colleagues, from the start of their respective careers through to their current roles managing over a billion dollars in spend for a Fortune 500 company, it’s not hard to see the trust and shared language that exists between the pair. “We were both taught to do things the same way when we were starting out,” explains DeMarco. “It’s a heck of a lot easier to work with someone that went through bootcamp with you, for lack of a better word. You value the same things, you tackle problems the same way.”
Click here to read the full story and much, much more, in the latest issue of CPO Strategy.
