Last month, I attended the Silicon Valley ISM meeting where Economic Club of San Francisco President Ingo Bischoff made a spirited case for the US to return to the gold standard. At it’s core, I understood Ingo’s argument - a mix of history, politics, economics and philosophy - to be a matter of trust. With [...]

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Last week, the NYTimes reported on the growing trend of companies trimming labor expenses - in the form of salaries, benefits, forced furloughs, 4 day work weeks, etc - rather than slashing headcount.
“Companies taking nips and tucks to their work force say this economy plunged so quickly in October that they do not want to [...]

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Jason Busch recently penned a post on the use of Web 2.0 tools in procurement and lamented the absence of a killer app that has become an indispensable site professionals use on a daily basis (although he did tease us with a possible solution in early 2009). Point taken. After all, even the “bright spots” [...]

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Last Friday, the Huffington Post published the results of their small business survey and the news was grim. With around 600 responses, crunching the numbers revealed:
“Just about a third of the businesses that responded have had layoffs already, and almost half have reduced hours. Overall, they say layoffs are about equal to 15% of the [...]

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My post earlier this week questioning why more businesses are not capitalizing on today’s highly favorable sourcing markets generated some interesting comments. One supply chain exec suggests that many companies are like “deer in the headlights,” literally frozen by fear. He suggests getting unstuck will require spend management professionals to engage in more tactical strikes [...]

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