In 2008 I told procurement to think like a CFO and act like a CIO. In 2026, I am telling the C-suite to think like procurement.
Earlier this week, David Shillingford shared a recap of a Fortune COO Summit panel on whether supply chains are ready for the next disruption. It is a sharp summary, and worth reading in full. But one detail in it stopped me, because it closed a loop I have been waiting almost two decades to see close.
The detail was Brittany Bagley.
Bagley holds both the COO and the CFO seats at Axon — and, as the panel surfaced, she balances those two sometimes-competing mandates through the lens of supply chain operations. Her co-panelist Jackie Zhu, who has led supply chain at a company that has topped the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 three years running, framed the aim of a supply chain not as growth but as profitable growth, achieved through agility and flexibility rather than redundancy alone.
Read those two together and you are looking at a single person, in a single role, holding cost, continuity, technology, and operations as one decision rather than four. The functional silos did not just soften. In her seat, they collapsed into a point.
I want to explain why that detail matters to me specifically — and why I think it matters to anyone in the C-suite right now far more than the panel’s framing let on.
What I Was Teaching in 2008
In 2008 I built and delivered an accredited seminar through the Purchasing Management Association of Canada called The Changing Face of Procurement. Its subtitle was The End of Functional Silos.
The argument, in 2008, was considered mildly radical: that the traditional boundaries of functional responsibility were dissolving, and that to survive the shift, the procurement professional would have to learn to think like a CFO and act like a CIO. I spent a good portion of the seminar walking attendees through how a CFO actually thinks — credentials, risk appetite, strategic view of the whole organization — and how a CIO actually thinks — innovation pressure, platform rationalization, looking past the technology to the people using it — and then asking the room a deliberately uncomfortable question: which of those attributes do you already share, and why are you not acting on them?
I am not reconstructing this from memory. The deck exists, timestamped. So do the responses. One attendee, a purchasing agent, wrote afterward that what I had been teaching was “how to get supply chain and finance working together,” and the consequences of not bringing people together to work in a collective environment. Another wrote that the material covered exactly what his team did every day, and opened eyes to “what can happen in another year or so.” That was 2008.
That “another year or so” turned out to be considerably longer. But it has now arrived, and it arrived in the body of an executive sitting on a Fortune panel holding two C-suite titles at once.
The Part That Reversed
Here is what has actually changed, and it is not what most people would guess.
In 2008, the cross-pollination only ran one direction, because it could only run one direction. Procurement was the junior function arguing for relevance. So the instruction was: procurement, climb. Think like the CFO. Act like the CIO. Earn the seat.
In 2026, the silos I said would fall have fallen — and the direction of the instruction has reversed. The interesting question is no longer how procurement learns to think like the C-suite. It is how the C-suite learns to think like procurement.
Because procurement was always the function that lived at the intersection the rest of the organization is only now being forced into. Cost and continuity in tension. Technology decisions that are really supplier-dependency decisions. Operational performance that turns out to be governed by contract structure and hand-off timing. That intersection was procurement’s daily reality for decades while everyone else enjoyed the luxury of a single mandate. Bagley’s seat — cost and operations as one decision — is not a new frontier for procurement. It is procurement’s old neighborhood, now occupied by the C-suite.
So the 2026 version of the message is the inversion of the 2008 one: think like a procurement professional. Not as a courtesy to the function, but because the procurement view — cross-functional, dependency-aware, allergic to the assumption that a clean org chart equals a resilient operation — is the view the disruption environment now demands of everyone.
Why the Convergence Is Necessary, Not Just Tidy
It would be easy to file this under “break down silos,” nod, and move on. That would miss the point, and it is the point David’s panel circled without quite naming.
The reason cross-functional convergence matters is not organizational tidiness. It is that capability dies on contact with reality when the underlying conditions are not aligned — and misalignment lives precisely in the seams between functions that silos protect.
This is the conclusion I keep returning to, and the panel’s own examples prove it. The hidden costs of disruption, the panelists noted, are buried in administrative load and workforce strain — exactly the places where a finance view, an operations view, and a supplier view fail to meet. AI, the panel hoped, might strip that work away. It might. But only in an organization where those views are already aligned. Point a capable system at the seams between unaligned functions and it will execute against the misalignment at speed — faster, more confident, and no more correct.
Which is why I have come to a conclusion that sounds heretical in a year this consumed by AI: the technology era is largely irrelevant to outcomes if the conditions required to absorb the capability are not already present. The technology changes what the organization is capable of. The alignment of the underlying conditions — what I call the substrate, and what Phase 0™ exists to diagnose — determines whether the organization survives the moment that capability meets reality.
I have watched this prove out where the number was external and could have embarrassed me. A 1998 Department of National Defence engagement was running parts delivery at 51% against a 90% requirement. The fix was not technology. It was discovering that the timing of orders silently governed customs windows, courier schedules, inventory, pricing, and ultimately delivery. The substrate was misaligned across functional lines. Once aligned, performance moved to 97.3% and held for seven years. The technology never changed. The conditions did — and the alignment was, in effect, the end of a functional silo.
The Loop, Closed
So when I say Brittany Bagley closed a loop for me, this is what I mean. In 2008 I was arguing that the silos would fall and that procurement would have to become cross-functional to survive. In 2026 the silos have fallen, and the C-suite is the function now being forced to become cross-functional to survive. The vector reversed. The thesis held.
David is right that these are the executives asking the right questions. The question underneath their questions is the one procurement has been living for thirty years and the one Phase 0™ is built to answer: not whether you have the technology, but whether the conditions beneath it are aligned before the next disruption tests them.
The substrate isn’t more tech. It is whether the people, the dependencies, and the operating assumptions already align — across the very functional lines the C-suite spent a generation keeping apart.
The silos are finally falling. The only thing left to decide is whether yours come down by design, or by disruption.
With thanks to David Shillingford for surfacing the panel, and to Brittany Bagley and Jackie Zhu for making the convergence visible. Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and publisher of Procurement Insights, an independent research practice operating on a nineteen-year archive with zero vendor sponsorships.
-30-
Related
The End of Functional Silos Has Arrived. The Direction Just Reversed.
Posted on June 4, 2026
0
In 2008 I told procurement to think like a CFO and act like a CIO. In 2026, I am telling the C-suite to think like procurement.
Earlier this week, David Shillingford shared a recap of a Fortune COO Summit panel on whether supply chains are ready for the next disruption. It is a sharp summary, and worth reading in full. But one detail in it stopped me, because it closed a loop I have been waiting almost two decades to see close.
The detail was Brittany Bagley.
Bagley holds both the COO and the CFO seats at Axon — and, as the panel surfaced, she balances those two sometimes-competing mandates through the lens of supply chain operations. Her co-panelist Jackie Zhu, who has led supply chain at a company that has topped the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 three years running, framed the aim of a supply chain not as growth but as profitable growth, achieved through agility and flexibility rather than redundancy alone.
Read those two together and you are looking at a single person, in a single role, holding cost, continuity, technology, and operations as one decision rather than four. The functional silos did not just soften. In her seat, they collapsed into a point.
I want to explain why that detail matters to me specifically — and why I think it matters to anyone in the C-suite right now far more than the panel’s framing let on.
What I Was Teaching in 2008
In 2008 I built and delivered an accredited seminar through the Purchasing Management Association of Canada called The Changing Face of Procurement. Its subtitle was The End of Functional Silos.
The argument, in 2008, was considered mildly radical: that the traditional boundaries of functional responsibility were dissolving, and that to survive the shift, the procurement professional would have to learn to think like a CFO and act like a CIO. I spent a good portion of the seminar walking attendees through how a CFO actually thinks — credentials, risk appetite, strategic view of the whole organization — and how a CIO actually thinks — innovation pressure, platform rationalization, looking past the technology to the people using it — and then asking the room a deliberately uncomfortable question: which of those attributes do you already share, and why are you not acting on them?
I am not reconstructing this from memory. The deck exists, timestamped. So do the responses. One attendee, a purchasing agent, wrote afterward that what I had been teaching was “how to get supply chain and finance working together,” and the consequences of not bringing people together to work in a collective environment. Another wrote that the material covered exactly what his team did every day, and opened eyes to “what can happen in another year or so.” That was 2008.
That “another year or so” turned out to be considerably longer. But it has now arrived, and it arrived in the body of an executive sitting on a Fortune panel holding two C-suite titles at once.
The Part That Reversed
Here is what has actually changed, and it is not what most people would guess.
In 2008, the cross-pollination only ran one direction, because it could only run one direction. Procurement was the junior function arguing for relevance. So the instruction was: procurement, climb. Think like the CFO. Act like the CIO. Earn the seat.
In 2026, the silos I said would fall have fallen — and the direction of the instruction has reversed. The interesting question is no longer how procurement learns to think like the C-suite. It is how the C-suite learns to think like procurement.
Because procurement was always the function that lived at the intersection the rest of the organization is only now being forced into. Cost and continuity in tension. Technology decisions that are really supplier-dependency decisions. Operational performance that turns out to be governed by contract structure and hand-off timing. That intersection was procurement’s daily reality for decades while everyone else enjoyed the luxury of a single mandate. Bagley’s seat — cost and operations as one decision — is not a new frontier for procurement. It is procurement’s old neighborhood, now occupied by the C-suite.
So the 2026 version of the message is the inversion of the 2008 one: think like a procurement professional. Not as a courtesy to the function, but because the procurement view — cross-functional, dependency-aware, allergic to the assumption that a clean org chart equals a resilient operation — is the view the disruption environment now demands of everyone.
Why the Convergence Is Necessary, Not Just Tidy
It would be easy to file this under “break down silos,” nod, and move on. That would miss the point, and it is the point David’s panel circled without quite naming.
The reason cross-functional convergence matters is not organizational tidiness. It is that capability dies on contact with reality when the underlying conditions are not aligned — and misalignment lives precisely in the seams between functions that silos protect.
This is the conclusion I keep returning to, and the panel’s own examples prove it. The hidden costs of disruption, the panelists noted, are buried in administrative load and workforce strain — exactly the places where a finance view, an operations view, and a supplier view fail to meet. AI, the panel hoped, might strip that work away. It might. But only in an organization where those views are already aligned. Point a capable system at the seams between unaligned functions and it will execute against the misalignment at speed — faster, more confident, and no more correct.
Which is why I have come to a conclusion that sounds heretical in a year this consumed by AI: the technology era is largely irrelevant to outcomes if the conditions required to absorb the capability are not already present. The technology changes what the organization is capable of. The alignment of the underlying conditions — what I call the substrate, and what Phase 0™ exists to diagnose — determines whether the organization survives the moment that capability meets reality.
I have watched this prove out where the number was external and could have embarrassed me. A 1998 Department of National Defence engagement was running parts delivery at 51% against a 90% requirement. The fix was not technology. It was discovering that the timing of orders silently governed customs windows, courier schedules, inventory, pricing, and ultimately delivery. The substrate was misaligned across functional lines. Once aligned, performance moved to 97.3% and held for seven years. The technology never changed. The conditions did — and the alignment was, in effect, the end of a functional silo.
The Loop, Closed
So when I say Brittany Bagley closed a loop for me, this is what I mean. In 2008 I was arguing that the silos would fall and that procurement would have to become cross-functional to survive. In 2026 the silos have fallen, and the C-suite is the function now being forced to become cross-functional to survive. The vector reversed. The thesis held.
David is right that these are the executives asking the right questions. The question underneath their questions is the one procurement has been living for thirty years and the one Phase 0™ is built to answer: not whether you have the technology, but whether the conditions beneath it are aligned before the next disruption tests them.
The substrate isn’t more tech. It is whether the people, the dependencies, and the operating assumptions already align — across the very functional lines the C-suite spent a generation keeping apart.
The silos are finally falling. The only thing left to decide is whether yours come down by design, or by disruption.
With thanks to David Shillingford for surfacing the panel, and to Brittany Bagley and Jackie Zhu for making the convergence visible. Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and publisher of Procurement Insights, an independent research practice operating on a nineteen-year archive with zero vendor sponsorships.
-30-
Share this:
Like this:
Related