I love going to our Services & Sourcing Forum. As always, our event in Chicago was a great experience. In many ways it’s the highlight of my year as Research Director of the Sourcing & Vendor Management team. The forum takes almost a full year to pull together: picking topics, finding speakers, preparing content…all in the hopes we can help our clients learn something that will help them do their jobs better.

And in return for all that work, the SVM team always learns something too. The attendees, generally senior sourcing execs from big companies, are so willing to share their experiences with us and with each other that I always leave the forum feeling productive and smart and humble. Smart because I leave knowing we provided great content but humble because I always realize at the forum how much I still don’t know (or know well enough).

What did I learn this year? Here are some key nuggets (in no particular order or pattern):