Thought Leadership

An IACCM member recently asked about the Association’s role in thought leadership. He cited our work on developing a Capability Maturity Model for contracting, but wondered in what other areas IACCM is showing leadership.

When the Association was founded ten years ago, there was limited recognition of contracting as a source of value. To the extent that there was  focus on contracts, it was typically either about risk avoidance or administrative in nature. Most ‘experts’ were isolated individuals who had acquired extensive on-the-job experience, without the benefit of formal training. Some companies had developed pre-award expertise in bid and negotiation management and this sometimes included responsibilities for the contract, but there was no uniform understanding of the role, there was no underlying ‘body of knowledge’, there was no structured training and in general, there was no evident career path.

IACCM’s mission was to assist in the development of contract and commercial capabilities. The need for this development was a product of two powerful forces – globalization and the steady move from product sales towards solutions and services – which together made trading relationships more important and more complex. The founder corporations understood the need to build more consistent, market-responsive contracting capabilities – finding a balance between risk and opportunity.

In those ten years, IACCM has made enormous strides and many corporations and organizations have been able to take advantage of our work. ‘Thought leadership’ is an interesting concept when the space to be filled is largely a void. But IACCM has developed a range of tools and ideas that are today in common use, for example:

• Defined skills and knowledge for buy side and sell side contracting and commercial management
• A structured body of knowledge and on-line training programs
• Research and benchmarks that offer insights to current policy and practice and lead to ‘best practice’reports on a wide range of topics

Today, as I consider this question of thought leadership, I can point to the extent to which the IACCM community is succeeding:

•  in driving recognition of the importance of commercial and contracting competence;
• the extent to which we have defined a more strategic positioning for commercial / contracts value;
• the methods for measurement of results;
• our advocacy of new attitudes to the purpose and topics for negotiation;
• clear linkages between contracting and the relationship lifecycle;
• the development of standards.

Any thought-leadership organization depends on the quality of those participating, their commitment to continuous improvement and their dedication to research and collaboration. Overall, as I look back on our first ten years, I am not complacent – we have a long way still to go. But I can also see how far we have come, with virtually no resources, to placing our contracts and  commercial community into a new position of leadership – both in thought and action.