Procurement roles can sometimes be thought of as simply a business function that looks for the lowest price, but Sarah tells me about how much care and strategy is involve in every negotiation, whether it be with new or existing relationships. Having a strong understanding of your industry, competition, the firm you’re negotiating with, and even the individual across the table can all affect the ultimate outcome of buyer/supplier relationship.

“Last mile” delivery is the most salient portion of the supply chain industry, but it is also the most complicated and costly part. In the past, the US has only really relied on UPS, USPS, and FedEx. However, the growth in scale and scope of Amazon, rapidly changing that landscape. So what’s it like to compete in this industry? How will it change in the coming years, especially with our increasing reliance on those firms during the pandemic?

Marketing is already a challenging discipline because one must understand a plethora of complex interactions and motivations between the firm’s marketing mix and consumer. B2B marketing agencies have second and third orders of complexity. Not only do they have to be familiar with their market, but they also need to know their client’s market, and also know their client’s customer’s market!

Filling open positions at any company can be quite stressful. There are important trade offs between filling the role quickly versus filling the role with the right person. Kristy talks with us about how she helps firms develop strategies to not only hire the right person, but do to so efficiently. We also talk about the changing landscape of being a Talent Consultant and where her market might be expanding beyond what she traditionally targeted.

This month, we speak with Clinical Professor of Economics at DePaul and Principal at Black & Essington Solutions, Brian Thompson, about the behavioral components of decision-making and strategy. Cognition plays a massive role in how individuals and firms make decisions that ultimately might be suboptimal. With daily updates about the impact of COVID-19 on people, organizations, and the economy at large, we discuss how a couple of industries might experience pivots in the coming year.

In this episode, we speak with Raffaele Colucci about the ocean shipping industry. Raffaele is the Deputy Sales Director for the Mediterranean Shipping Company. His role requires a bird’s eye view of his entire line of business, so having a clear perspective on how the industry evolves is extremely important for strategic planning. There are many ways to analyze an industry, but one of the more popular and effective frameworks is with Michael Porter’s Forces. Raffaele walks us through a Forces’ analysis to give us some insight into his highly competitive industry.

Dan Clark talks with us about his roles as Senior Manager at the e-commerce platform Shop Your Way and as Founder of Navigating Knowledge, an Ed-Tech startup focused on creating a new way to learn through spatial mapping. At first glance, the Retail and Education industries don’t seem to have a lot in common. However, Dan has found that his experience with information and how we process it, can have implications across the boundaries of what we’d normally see has two vastly different industries.

This month we are joined by DePaul Alumnus of the Economics & Policy Analysis Masters Program, Aksh Gupta. Aksh is the Cofounder & CEO of Occasion, a startup dedicate to solving tech challenges of experiential businesses. Occasion addresses a common problem in such disparate industries like nail salons, live theatre, and pilates studios: A better reservation system. Now, reservation systems aren’t novel, and its apparently very a crowded industry. So what will be the key to Occasion’s success?