People often ask me why I wrote my book in French. In retrospect, it was not the smartest marketing move. Published in 2007, "Le Bon Accord Avec Le Bon Fournisseur" (The Right Deal With The Right Supplier") has been a modest success. In this post, I will tell you about some of the cross roads and what I decided at the time, share with you some of the regrets I have, or what I would have done differently.

I had thought about writing a book for quite some time. It was obvious to me it would be a technical book about supply chain management.

I had been working in procurement for many years, starting with an audit of the purchasing at a petrochemical plant in France when I was a young professional at AT Kearney. Back at the turn of the century, I got interested in eProcurement, assessing companies' readiness for online purchasing, running reverse auctions and aggressive negotiations to save $millions for my clients. Naturally, this led to more procurement operations and effectiveness assessments, using benchmarks from APQC, and the development of Capability Maturity Models, for major clients in the private and public sectors, across the US and Canada.

So by the time I led the consulting part of a comprehensive procurement transformation from start to finish, I had helped various organizations across the gamut of their supply chain operations, including procurement and purchasing - just not at the same one company. This project pulled it all together. It also confirmed my conviction that successful procurement helps the business succeed. Procurement operations that drive hard-nosed savings are often out of touch with the business, and make deals that the business doesn't want, resulting in lousy compliance and weak volumes.

Back in the days when I was running industry marketing to the supply chain at Digital Equipment in France, I was working with Bordeaux' Kedge Business School's Industrial Logistics Master program, and collaborating with their 2 learned publications, "Global Logistics Forum" in English, and "Logistique et Management" in French. This led me to write and update technical articles on "IT in Logistics" for the engineer's journal, Les Techniques de l'Ingenieur. This continues to this day, with another article on Tracking & Tracing in Logistics, and I am now working on the 4th version of the article, now titled "Digitizing the Supply Chain."

So I reached out to the same journal, and suggested an article on how to work with procurement for engineers. They accepted my idea, and I wrote a comprehensive article that reflected the way I saw the contribution of procurement, and how to ensure they are well aligned with what the business requires.

Imagine my surprise when I received the feedback from the editorial review!

I had not covered the procurement "risk killer", and my approach was altogether too soft. I would have to revise it substantially...

I thought carefully about this, and decided that I did not want to write that article. My sense was I was dealing with a procurement guy who enjoyed squeezing costs and adversarial supplier relationships. So I declined to rewrite the article.

I had a pretty good base written, and a very good idea of everything else that did not fit with the editorial proposal I had submitted. It was everything I had learned about procurement in over 20 years of consulting across Europe and North America.

So I decided to complete the article as a book. Since I had the base already written, I continued in French.

Smart? No.

I had been living in Canada for 20 years, and knew that English was the dominant language, and that there was a special relationship between the french speaking Canadians and the French.

In retrospect, I think I wrote the book in French because I could. I don't know many people who are as fluently bi-lingual as I am.

I ended up with a manuscript that I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

People also ask me why I don't translate it. You don't translate from French to English, you rewrite, or it is almost unreadable. That is a non-trivial undertaking, and I know I would essentially rewrite the entire book. Better, no doubt. But a big deal.

If I were to rewrite the book in English, I would insist far more on aligning with the business and looking for win/win outcomes with suppliers through the right economic and relationship models. This is particularly important for complex deals. The book does a great job of addressing simple or tactical deals, which are often 90% or more of the spend.

I would have handled the issues of innovation very differently, inspired by Vested-tm and collaborative discussions.

The technology space has evolved quite a bit too. The whole vendor data and compliance space has moved a giant step forward, with many different approaches. I think we are yet to see which ones will prevail. However, the quality of data remains an increasing challenge, and with AI, this only becomes more critical. The incursion of AI is also a chapter that cannot yet be written - I wonder if it will ever be stable enough to write in a book.