“Change is hard, but with a concrete vision for the future, a strategy for how to get there, and the right people around you, the skies are the limit for what is possible.”
Marnie Harte has been the Chief Procurement Officer at Hertz since May 2025 after leaving an established career in financial services. As part of its multi-year transformation, Hertz has been focused on reducing its operational expense and the procurement function has played an influential role in bringing that to fruition. Harte and her Global Supplier Management organisation are driving impactful results to Hertz’s bottom line while simultaneously undergoing a major transforming of the procurement function within the global mobility company.
Managing talent
It is fair to say talent management is a subject special to Harte. Earlier in her leadership journey, Harte read Radical Candor by Kim Scott which resonated with her. Harte believes in people and values upskilling and lifting her employees to reach their full potential, which sometimes comes with making sure they understand the hard messages on things that are holding them back.
“I am where I am today because leaders believed in me, gave me a chance and held me accountable,” she says. “I started in corporate America straight out of law school with limited experience and suddenly found myself in a role that included negotiating complex, multi-million dollar contracts that I probably had no business being in! With every new opportunity that presented itself, somebody believed in me enough to give me a chance to grow as an associate and as a leader, and then supported me along the way, giving me direct and honest feedback when I needed it. Those people that believed in me and took a risk on me changed the trajectory of my career, and I wouldn’t be in the situation I am today without them.”
Demonstrating leadership
Prior to joining Hertz, Harte spent over 18 years in a variety of roles in financial services, which she credits for helping lay the foundations for her to become the leader she is today.
“I wholeheartedly believe that to be the best possible procurement professional, you have to expose yourself to a variety of roles across different business functions. When I left procurement to go into operations and then risk, my perspective evolved considerably. I was always very business focused, I never wanted to be a blocker for work getting done, but my perspective was more focused on getting the deal signed than truly understanding the ‘why’ behind the purchases we were helping to facilitate in procurement. I also didn’t really understand how important things like having well managed processes, controls and monitoring were to an organisation. Having now led operations functions during my time in financial services, and seen what can happen when a company does not fully keep the promises it makes to its customers or otherwise, I understand the criticality of things like this and can make sure that perspective is understood, valued and prioritised. A procurement team should function like any other business unit, it should be well managed, operate efficiently and deliver considerable value to the bottom line.
“I decided to move on from my role in financial services for the love of procurement. I learned a ton from my later years in risk and operations, but I also missed working with suppliers and doing deals. This role at Hertz allowed me to build on my love of procurement and fully embrace a very impactful transformation journey.”
Today, leadership is a core component of who Harte is as a person. She said her passion and approach originally came from watching her father, Bruce Harte, in action during his career, and that it has been further established through putting her own spin on the things she has learned from working with great leaders, including those she now works with at Hertz. Over the years, the teams that Harte has worked with have benefited from her ability to grow talent, foster innovative solutions, develop and execute strategy and drive operational excellence. Harte’s vision is rooted in cultivating a forward-thinking culture, where challenging the norm is encouraged to achieve outstanding business results. And paying it forward to the next person is Harte’s interpretation of a great culture.
“Teamwork is helping each other, and if someone has a growth area, who cares, we all do…I have a lot! The key question is how do we support them moving forward? Finding the way to unlock the greatness in everyone is the holy grail of leadership. I always try to hire people that are smarter than me and more talented than me in different ways in order to build out a diverse and fully optimised team. If you hire those types of people and truly invest in them and empower them it unleashes scalability in a way that is truly powerful. I don’t believe you need a team of super high performing clones – you need interesting, diversely skilled, talented, and motivated people who share a common vision and are committed to achieving it as a team.”
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