When in Rome – watch out for potholes!
When I lecture on Bad Buying, as I do at the Skema business school in Lille, I ask the students to think about what sort of procurement related fraud or […]
Entries by Peter Smith
Musk to address US government spending – what fun awaits!
In the legendary Philip Green review of 2010, the new UK Prime Minister David Cameron asked the retail entrepreneur to take a look at government procurement. Some years later, the […]
HOW MUCH for a soap dispenser??
Stories about apparently grotesque over-payment by public bodies for mundane items is always good for a headline or two. We saw that back in the days of the Private Finance […]
Manipulating the specification for procurement fraud
One of the more creative ways of committing procurement-related fraud is by the manipulation of specifications. It requires a little more skill than simply bribing a decision maker to choose […]
Can politics learn from the ethics of procurement?
The headlines in the UK have been dominated in recent days about whether it is acceptable for politicians to receive gifts and hospitality from political donors. The new Labour government […]
Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report – Just Terrible
I’ve generally stayed away from writing about the Grenfell fire tragedy. It just seemed too serious and horrible an issue to be talking about “bad buying” and technical procurement issues. […]
CIPS Annual Report – a Mixed Bag
The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) annual report is out now for the year ending October 2023. I’m not sure exactly when it was published but it always […]
Big consulting firms fail to “Transform”
A recent report suggested that the majority of clients of the big three strategy consulting firms are unhappy with the performance of the large consulting firms. An article in The […]
Prioritisation Matters – A Story about my Phone
I’ve been intending to tell this story for a couple of months now, but prevarication is a terrible thing, as we will see. I owned – well, I still do […]
A Walk Through HS2
It is a while since I wrote about the UK’s infinite rail transport money pit, also known as HS2. When I first started criticising it years ago, based on my […]