上周我introduced this metaphor series, which I’m kicking off on what might seem like a strange topic. But please bear with me.
According to microbiologist Rob Knight, a typical human body has roughly10 trillion human cells在里面。但它也有大约100万亿细胞的微生物生活在它内部。（我甚至不会进入皮肤螨虫话题。）
That’s a 10X difference. And the largest group of microbes are in our gut. Our genome is made up of roughly 20,000 genes, but the collective genome from all the microbes is between 2 million and 20 million genes. That’s up to a 100X difference. So, genetically, we’re more microbe than man (or woman). Cool.
But it gets better.
还有很酷的是，几乎有几乎有130个人基因没有来自我们内部，而是存在将自己拼接到我们的DNA中的异物微生物基因。他们已成为我们的一部分。最后，虽然你可能会思考，因为所有人都是基本上分享99.9％在相同的人体DNA中，微生物存在相同的情况。但它没有。只有大约10％的微生物DNA是对人类的常见。美国的微生物产品组合与我们每个人一样独特。
Most fascinatingly, there’s anincreasingly strong scientific linkbetween overall health and cognitive health with this population of microbes. For example,your kids eating dirtmight not be such a bad thing, as your body responds to and assimilates to the external environment. It becomes more familiar with the environment and resilient in response to it. If you don’t get enough of the “good microbes,” such as those found in yogurt, then you might benefit from probiotics, which are healthy microbes and the opposite of antibiotics, which can kill good microbes as well as bad ones.
So, herein lies the analogy. Your company is like a human body, and your suppliers are microbes. Most are beneficial. Some are not. And they vastly outnumber your procurement people.
If you have $1 billion in spend and have roughly 50 full-time employees, you may have something like more than 5,000 suppliers. So that’s the 100X ratio we saw earlier! The big lesson here is that suppliers are part of you and infused into your overall value chain.
Yes, we need some basic supplier consolidation in some spend areas, but we don’t want to overprescribe our antibiotic sourcing efforts. We want to bring in external DNA through supplier innovation, crowdsourcing, multichannel talent pools, managed services and so on. So, a program like P&G’sConnect and Developis akin to kicking the kids — design engineers and procurement folks alike — outside of the climate-controlled building to play in the dirt, get their hands dirty with both customers and suppliers and bring outside-in innovation to the firm and then right back out. Yes, you’ll get exposed to some risk and might even get sick now and then, but you’ll get smarter, more resilient and healthier in the long term.
Just don’t call your suppliers microbes. They might not always appreciate it.