How many of today’s CPOs have actually slept under their desk?
Posted in: Procurement Insights · CIO Insights · CFO Insights
Eighty-six percent of professional soccer coaches played the game at the professional level. Eighty to ninety percent of Major League Baseball managers played professionally.
That is not a coincidence. It is not sentiment. It is a recognition — built into the hiring criteria of the most competitive organizations in the world — that you cannot lead from a mental model you have never inhabited.
The coach who played knows what it feels like when the incentive structure makes the wrong behavior the path of least resistance. He has been the player who sandbagged. He has felt the metric pulling him toward the behavior that looked like performance and was destroying the team. He recognizes it the moment he sees it — not because someone put it in a report, but because he has lived on the other side of the decision.
Now ask a different question.
How many CPOs have personally sat in a procurement role where a performance metric they were measured on directly conflicted with the right process behavior? How many CFOs have managed a budget that created the exact incentive misalignment they are now trying to govern? How many CIOs have been the person in the field watching a system make the wrong behavior structurally easier than the right one?
Across most large organizations, the honest answer is: very few.
The Front Line That Most C-Suite Leaders Have Never Seen
In 1998, at Canada’s Department of National Defence, I asked a single question before any technology was deployed: What time of day do orders come in?
The answer — 4 PM — revealed something that no governance framework, no change management program, and no consultant’s white paper had surfaced. Service technicians were sandbagging parts orders until end of day because their performance metric rewarded call response numbers, not call close rates. Getting to the fire fast. Not being able to open the hydrant.
Nobody was being dishonest. Nobody was resisting change. They were optimizing the metric they had been given by a leadership structure that had never stood at the closed hydrant.
The head of the service department was a capable executive. The moment he saw the full picture — that his technicians’ response numbers were being achieved at the direct expense of parts availability, that the client was paying a premium for spare parts that arrived too late to resolve the problem — he changed course immediately. Not because of a change management program. Because the reality of the front line had finally reached the level where authority to act actually lived.
That moment — the C-Suite realization that the metric was optimizing the wrong behavior — is what changed delivery performance from 51 percent to 97.3 percent in three months and sustained it for seven years.
No new technology. No training cascade. No communications plan. A leader who finally saw what his people on the front line already knew.
The Question the Hiring Process Doesn’t Ask
When organizations hire a CPO, they typically look for financial acumen, strategic thinking, vendor management experience, and leadership track record. They look for someone who has managed large procurement budgets and built high-performing teams.
They rarely ask whether the candidate has personally experienced the moment when the incentive structure made the wrong procurement behavior the path of least resistance. Whether they have sat at a terminal entering orders at 4 PM because stopping earlier would have hurt their numbers. Whether they have felt the gap between what the policy said and what the system rewarded.
The soccer coach asks this implicitly by requiring professional playing experience. The MLB manager asks it by requiring time on the field. The procurement function — like most of the C-Suite — does not ask it at all.
This is not a criticism of the executives currently holding these roles. Many are skilled, experienced, and effective within the mental model they have developed. The problem is structural: without front-line experience, the C-Suite cannot recognize — from the inside — the difference between a metric that reflects performance and a metric that is being optimized at the expense of performance.
They can read about it. They can commission research on it. They can approve governance frameworks designed to prevent it. And they will celebrate when the fire truck arrives on time, because that is the metric they understand — but nobody in the room has stood at the closed hydrant.
What is striking is that this question was already being asked — and already going unanswered — in 2007. In a panel discussion involving senior procurement executives from organizations including Nestlé, Danone, British Airways, and Merrill Lynch, one panelist highlighted the benefits of CPOs “coming from outside the procurement world.” Referring to these individuals as “people who come from business and therefore understand the business language,” the executive indicated that the new CPOs “tend to be wonderfully connected in their organizations” — bringing credibility that would “help to bring procurement into the mainstream.”
The archive noted the question that followed: is being “wonderfully connected” necessarily the most important qualification for a CPO? Or is it the hallmark of a project champion — someone who bridges procurement to the rest of the business without actually knowing what the front line of procurement looks like under pressure?
The same panelist answered that question himself, without intending to: “I come from business and when I leave procurement I’ll go back to business.”
That single line — published in August 2007 — is the front-line gap stated in the executive’s own words. Procurement as a transit stop. The function led by someone whose mental model is already oriented toward the exit. And the organizations in that panel — global enterprises with sophisticated procurement operations — were celebrating it as a credential.
Eighteen years later, the failure rate has not moved. The transit model and the credentialed outsider are still the hiring norm. And the hydrant is still closed.
[Full post: Procurement’s Expanding Role and the Executive of the Future — Procurement Insights, August 2007]
Bar chart comparing percentage of professional sports coaches who played professionally (85–90%) versus CPOs and ProcureTech CEOs with front-line operational experience (under 25%), with Korn Ferry imposter syndrome callout.
The Statistic That Should Stop Every C-Suite Conversation
According to a 2024 Korn Ferry survey, 71 percent of US CEOs and 65 percent of senior executives experience imposter syndrome.
That statistic deserves more than a moment’s pause. It deserves a structural explanation.
Imposter syndrome, at its core, is the persistent feeling that you have not earned the authority you hold — that you are operating outside the zone of competence that legitimately grounds your decisions. It is not a character flaw. It is not a confidence problem. In many cases, it is an accurate signal.
The soccer coach who played professionally does not experience imposter syndrome about reading the game. His authority is grounded in inhabited experience. He has been the striker making the decision under pressure. He knows what the metric feels like from the inside. When he walks into the room, he is not performing competence. He carries it.
The CPO who has never placed a purchase order under conflicting metric pressure — who has risen through financial analysis, strategic planning, or general management — is leading a function whose front-line reality they have never inhabited. The imposter feeling is not weakness. It is an accurate signal that the experiential foundation which would make that authority feel fully legitimate is absent.
And that gap produces one of two responses — both of which are recognizable in the failure rate the archive has been documenting for twenty-eight years.
The first: the executive defers to the frameworks, the vendors, and the consultants that project confidence. Gartner, McKinsey, the Magic Quadrant. External authority substitutes for the internal grounding that playing experience would have provided. The governance gets built on someone else’s model of what the front line looks like.
The second: the executive overcompensates with certainty — approving decisions with a confidence that is inversely proportional to their actual understanding of the front-line conditions. Nobody in the room will say the hydrant is closed when the C-Suite’s confidence has made the room unwilling to say so.
Both responses produce the fire truck problem. And both are more understandable — and more addressable — when you recognize that 71 percent of the CEOs in those rooms are operating with the same unspoken sense that their authority exceeds their grounded experience.
Phase 0™ is not just a pre-commitment diagnostic. For the executive experiencing imposter syndrome — accurately, because the front line is genuinely unfamiliar — it is the structured mechanism that provides what playing experience would have built naturally: a grounded, evidence-based understanding of the real conditions their authority is governing.
It does not replace the experience. But it closes the gap that imposter syndrome is accurately signaling.
What Twenty-Eight Years of the Failure Rate Is Telling Us
The enterprise technology failure rate has held between 55 and 75 percent across seven distinct technology eras spanning more than four decades. The technology improved in every era. The failure rate did not.
The conventional explanation is poor change management, inadequate governance, insufficient vendor due diligence, or misaligned stakeholder expectations. These are all real contributors. But they all share a structural assumption: that the problem lies in the execution layer, not in the leadership mental model above it.
What twenty-eight years of independently documenting this pattern has confirmed is something more fundamental. The organizations that consistently achieve outcomes are led by people who understand — from direct experience or from rigorous diagnostic work — how the front line actually operates. What metrics drive behavior. What the incentive structure makes easy and what it makes hard. Where the policy says one thing and the system allows something different.
The soccer coach carries that understanding from his playing days. He does not need a consultant to tell him the striker is sandbagging. He recognizes the body language, the timing, the pattern — because he has been the striker.
The CPO who has never placed a purchase order under pressure, never felt a supplier relationship metric pull against a compliance obligation, never watched a system make the wrong behavior easier than the right one — that CPO is governing a reality they have not inhabited. And when the governance framework produces the expected outputs and the outcomes still don’t materialize, they commission another report.
What Phase 0™ Substitutes For
This is the structural role Phase 0™ occupies that no other framework formally addresses.
Phase 0™ is not change management. It is not governance. It is not vendor due diligence. It is the diagnostic mechanism that surfaces the front-line reality — the behaviors, the incentive structures, the signal-generating processes — to the level of leadership where authority to act actually lives.
It is, in precise terms, what the soccer coach carries into the room automatically from his playing experience. For the C-Suite executive who has never been on the front line of the function they lead, Phase 0™ provides the structured briefing that substitutes for the years of direct experience the coach or manager built before they were ever handed the clipboard.
Without it, the governance framework is built on an assumed reality. The change management program moves people toward a future state whose preconditions have not been verified. And the metric being optimized at the C-Suite level continues to reward behavior that is destroying the outcome it claims to measure.
The fire truck arrives on time. The hydrant stays closed.
The Harder Question
The baseball manager who played the game does not need to be told that his shortstop is playing the wrong angle on a ground ball. He has played the angle. He knows.
The question the enterprise technology transformation market has never formally asked — and the question that the 55 to 75 percent failure rate is the cost of not asking — is this:
Does the CPO know where the hydrant is — and more importantly, how to open it to get the water flowing?
Not from a report. Not from a governance framework. Not from a change management program. Does the CPO know, from the kind of direct or deeply diagnostic understanding that changes behavior rather than describing it, what is actually happening at the front line of the function they lead?
If the answer is yes, the technology can be selected, the governance can be built, and the change management can be sequenced correctly.
If the answer is no — if the C-Suite mental model is built on an assumed generalized “best practice” reality that the front line has long since learned to work around — then no technology, no governance framework, and no change management program will close the gap.
Phase 0™ asks the question before the commitment is made. Because after the commitment, the fire truck is already en route — and whether the hydrant opens depends entirely on a foundation that either was or wasn’t verified before the alarm sounded.
The 30-minute readiness conversation is where we ask what the CPO knows — and what the organization needs before the next commitment is made.
Book a readiness conversation: calendly.com/jon-toq/30min
For more information on Hansen Models™: hansenprocurement.com
The reference to Elon Musk sleeping under his desk originates from a 2020 book by JP McAvoy titled The Millionaire’s Lawyer: Grow And Sell Your Business For Maximum Profitability. The observation that a founder’s willingness to inhabit the operational reality of his own organization — literally, not metaphorically — is what separates grounded leadership from credentialed distance was documented in that manuscript before it became the closing question of this post. The archive runs deeper than the blog.
Phase 0™ · HFS™ Hansen Fit Score™ · RAM 2025™ · Hansen Models™ 18 years · 3,300+ documents · Zero vendor sponsorships · Zero paid analyst relationships
-30-
Procurement Insights 
Who Is My CPO, and Why Should I Follow Their Lead?
Posted on April 4, 2026
0
How many of today’s CPOs have actually slept under their desk?
Posted in: Procurement Insights · CIO Insights · CFO Insights
Eighty-six percent of professional soccer coaches played the game at the professional level. Eighty to ninety percent of Major League Baseball managers played professionally.
That is not a coincidence. It is not sentiment. It is a recognition — built into the hiring criteria of the most competitive organizations in the world — that you cannot lead from a mental model you have never inhabited.
The coach who played knows what it feels like when the incentive structure makes the wrong behavior the path of least resistance. He has been the player who sandbagged. He has felt the metric pulling him toward the behavior that looked like performance and was destroying the team. He recognizes it the moment he sees it — not because someone put it in a report, but because he has lived on the other side of the decision.
Now ask a different question.
How many CPOs have personally sat in a procurement role where a performance metric they were measured on directly conflicted with the right process behavior? How many CFOs have managed a budget that created the exact incentive misalignment they are now trying to govern? How many CIOs have been the person in the field watching a system make the wrong behavior structurally easier than the right one?
Across most large organizations, the honest answer is: very few.
The Front Line That Most C-Suite Leaders Have Never Seen
In 1998, at Canada’s Department of National Defence, I asked a single question before any technology was deployed: What time of day do orders come in?
The answer — 4 PM — revealed something that no governance framework, no change management program, and no consultant’s white paper had surfaced. Service technicians were sandbagging parts orders until end of day because their performance metric rewarded call response numbers, not call close rates. Getting to the fire fast. Not being able to open the hydrant.
Nobody was being dishonest. Nobody was resisting change. They were optimizing the metric they had been given by a leadership structure that had never stood at the closed hydrant.
The head of the service department was a capable executive. The moment he saw the full picture — that his technicians’ response numbers were being achieved at the direct expense of parts availability, that the client was paying a premium for spare parts that arrived too late to resolve the problem — he changed course immediately. Not because of a change management program. Because the reality of the front line had finally reached the level where authority to act actually lived.
That moment — the C-Suite realization that the metric was optimizing the wrong behavior — is what changed delivery performance from 51 percent to 97.3 percent in three months and sustained it for seven years.
No new technology. No training cascade. No communications plan. A leader who finally saw what his people on the front line already knew.
The Question the Hiring Process Doesn’t Ask
When organizations hire a CPO, they typically look for financial acumen, strategic thinking, vendor management experience, and leadership track record. They look for someone who has managed large procurement budgets and built high-performing teams.
They rarely ask whether the candidate has personally experienced the moment when the incentive structure made the wrong procurement behavior the path of least resistance. Whether they have sat at a terminal entering orders at 4 PM because stopping earlier would have hurt their numbers. Whether they have felt the gap between what the policy said and what the system rewarded.
The soccer coach asks this implicitly by requiring professional playing experience. The MLB manager asks it by requiring time on the field. The procurement function — like most of the C-Suite — does not ask it at all.
This is not a criticism of the executives currently holding these roles. Many are skilled, experienced, and effective within the mental model they have developed. The problem is structural: without front-line experience, the C-Suite cannot recognize — from the inside — the difference between a metric that reflects performance and a metric that is being optimized at the expense of performance.
They can read about it. They can commission research on it. They can approve governance frameworks designed to prevent it. And they will celebrate when the fire truck arrives on time, because that is the metric they understand — but nobody in the room has stood at the closed hydrant.
What is striking is that this question was already being asked — and already going unanswered — in 2007. In a panel discussion involving senior procurement executives from organizations including Nestlé, Danone, British Airways, and Merrill Lynch, one panelist highlighted the benefits of CPOs “coming from outside the procurement world.” Referring to these individuals as “people who come from business and therefore understand the business language,” the executive indicated that the new CPOs “tend to be wonderfully connected in their organizations” — bringing credibility that would “help to bring procurement into the mainstream.”
The archive noted the question that followed: is being “wonderfully connected” necessarily the most important qualification for a CPO? Or is it the hallmark of a project champion — someone who bridges procurement to the rest of the business without actually knowing what the front line of procurement looks like under pressure?
The same panelist answered that question himself, without intending to: “I come from business and when I leave procurement I’ll go back to business.”
That single line — published in August 2007 — is the front-line gap stated in the executive’s own words. Procurement as a transit stop. The function led by someone whose mental model is already oriented toward the exit. And the organizations in that panel — global enterprises with sophisticated procurement operations — were celebrating it as a credential.
Eighteen years later, the failure rate has not moved. The transit model and the credentialed outsider are still the hiring norm. And the hydrant is still closed.
[Full post: Procurement’s Expanding Role and the Executive of the Future — Procurement Insights, August 2007]
Bar chart comparing percentage of professional sports coaches who played professionally (85–90%) versus CPOs and ProcureTech CEOs with front-line operational experience (under 25%), with Korn Ferry imposter syndrome callout.
The Statistic That Should Stop Every C-Suite Conversation
According to a 2024 Korn Ferry survey, 71 percent of US CEOs and 65 percent of senior executives experience imposter syndrome.
That statistic deserves more than a moment’s pause. It deserves a structural explanation.
Imposter syndrome, at its core, is the persistent feeling that you have not earned the authority you hold — that you are operating outside the zone of competence that legitimately grounds your decisions. It is not a character flaw. It is not a confidence problem. In many cases, it is an accurate signal.
The soccer coach who played professionally does not experience imposter syndrome about reading the game. His authority is grounded in inhabited experience. He has been the striker making the decision under pressure. He knows what the metric feels like from the inside. When he walks into the room, he is not performing competence. He carries it.
The CPO who has never placed a purchase order under conflicting metric pressure — who has risen through financial analysis, strategic planning, or general management — is leading a function whose front-line reality they have never inhabited. The imposter feeling is not weakness. It is an accurate signal that the experiential foundation which would make that authority feel fully legitimate is absent.
And that gap produces one of two responses — both of which are recognizable in the failure rate the archive has been documenting for twenty-eight years.
The first: the executive defers to the frameworks, the vendors, and the consultants that project confidence. Gartner, McKinsey, the Magic Quadrant. External authority substitutes for the internal grounding that playing experience would have provided. The governance gets built on someone else’s model of what the front line looks like.
The second: the executive overcompensates with certainty — approving decisions with a confidence that is inversely proportional to their actual understanding of the front-line conditions. Nobody in the room will say the hydrant is closed when the C-Suite’s confidence has made the room unwilling to say so.
Both responses produce the fire truck problem. And both are more understandable — and more addressable — when you recognize that 71 percent of the CEOs in those rooms are operating with the same unspoken sense that their authority exceeds their grounded experience.
Phase 0™ is not just a pre-commitment diagnostic. For the executive experiencing imposter syndrome — accurately, because the front line is genuinely unfamiliar — it is the structured mechanism that provides what playing experience would have built naturally: a grounded, evidence-based understanding of the real conditions their authority is governing.
It does not replace the experience. But it closes the gap that imposter syndrome is accurately signaling.
What Twenty-Eight Years of the Failure Rate Is Telling Us
The enterprise technology failure rate has held between 55 and 75 percent across seven distinct technology eras spanning more than four decades. The technology improved in every era. The failure rate did not.
The conventional explanation is poor change management, inadequate governance, insufficient vendor due diligence, or misaligned stakeholder expectations. These are all real contributors. But they all share a structural assumption: that the problem lies in the execution layer, not in the leadership mental model above it.
What twenty-eight years of independently documenting this pattern has confirmed is something more fundamental. The organizations that consistently achieve outcomes are led by people who understand — from direct experience or from rigorous diagnostic work — how the front line actually operates. What metrics drive behavior. What the incentive structure makes easy and what it makes hard. Where the policy says one thing and the system allows something different.
The soccer coach carries that understanding from his playing days. He does not need a consultant to tell him the striker is sandbagging. He recognizes the body language, the timing, the pattern — because he has been the striker.
The CPO who has never placed a purchase order under pressure, never felt a supplier relationship metric pull against a compliance obligation, never watched a system make the wrong behavior easier than the right one — that CPO is governing a reality they have not inhabited. And when the governance framework produces the expected outputs and the outcomes still don’t materialize, they commission another report.
What Phase 0™ Substitutes For
This is the structural role Phase 0™ occupies that no other framework formally addresses.
Phase 0™ is not change management. It is not governance. It is not vendor due diligence. It is the diagnostic mechanism that surfaces the front-line reality — the behaviors, the incentive structures, the signal-generating processes — to the level of leadership where authority to act actually lives.
It is, in precise terms, what the soccer coach carries into the room automatically from his playing experience. For the C-Suite executive who has never been on the front line of the function they lead, Phase 0™ provides the structured briefing that substitutes for the years of direct experience the coach or manager built before they were ever handed the clipboard.
Without it, the governance framework is built on an assumed reality. The change management program moves people toward a future state whose preconditions have not been verified. And the metric being optimized at the C-Suite level continues to reward behavior that is destroying the outcome it claims to measure.
The fire truck arrives on time. The hydrant stays closed.
The Harder Question
The baseball manager who played the game does not need to be told that his shortstop is playing the wrong angle on a ground ball. He has played the angle. He knows.
The question the enterprise technology transformation market has never formally asked — and the question that the 55 to 75 percent failure rate is the cost of not asking — is this:
Does the CPO know where the hydrant is — and more importantly, how to open it to get the water flowing?
Not from a report. Not from a governance framework. Not from a change management program. Does the CPO know, from the kind of direct or deeply diagnostic understanding that changes behavior rather than describing it, what is actually happening at the front line of the function they lead?
If the answer is yes, the technology can be selected, the governance can be built, and the change management can be sequenced correctly.
If the answer is no — if the C-Suite mental model is built on an assumed generalized “best practice” reality that the front line has long since learned to work around — then no technology, no governance framework, and no change management program will close the gap.
Phase 0™ asks the question before the commitment is made. Because after the commitment, the fire truck is already en route — and whether the hydrant opens depends entirely on a foundation that either was or wasn’t verified before the alarm sounded.
The 30-minute readiness conversation is where we ask what the CPO knows — and what the organization needs before the next commitment is made.
Book a readiness conversation: calendly.com/jon-toq/30min
For more information on Hansen Models™: hansenprocurement.com
The reference to Elon Musk sleeping under his desk originates from a 2020 book by JP McAvoy titled The Millionaire’s Lawyer: Grow And Sell Your Business For Maximum Profitability. The observation that a founder’s willingness to inhabit the operational reality of his own organization — literally, not metaphorically — is what separates grounded leadership from credentialed distance was documented in that manuscript before it became the closing question of this post. The archive runs deeper than the blog.
Phase 0™ · HFS™ Hansen Fit Score™ · RAM 2025™ · Hansen Models™ 18 years · 3,300+ documents · Zero vendor sponsorships · Zero paid analyst relationships
-30-
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