January 22, 2023

Last evening I showed up at the CIPS Networking event. As the day progressed, I was slipping into my usual self wherein I started looking for excuses not to go. What was the point? What if I bumped into vendors who are currently bidding on live event and would ask me stuff I couldn't answer or make me uncomfortable? I didn't know anyone- what if I ended up just hanging around while others interacted with known networks? And the traffic- what to speak of traffic to get to DIFC at 6 or 7 in the evening? So, at some point I called the wife to seek an opinion. An involuntary response if there ever was one. She said the traffic would be really bad- you should skip and let them know. I was happy that my excuses were validated. But something told me that I needed to fight this. Fight the tendency to avoid and shy away. I recorded Take on Me a few days ago - one of the key phrases that keep repeating, although more in a romantic context, was " You're shying away!". This what I do. This is what I was doing. It had to stop. So, I texted the wife informing her that I was going to attend- there would always be reasons not to.

I headed out at around 6- and sure enough I was stuck in nasty traffic along Sheikh Zayed Road all the way. I got to the venue at 7.15 or so. Used the Valet Parking and headed in and up to the terrace of the "Amazonico", where the event was being held. Fortunately for me, I met another gent in the elevator who was head there and I said hello and started a chat. This was doubly fortunate because the gent was a very well-known member and one of the senior CIPS guys in Dubai. Worked for Accenture, heading Procurement practice. When I got to the terrace I was a bit intimidated by the crowd- a massive turnout, far more than what I had expected., and most people in a suit or a jacket. I was dressed ok, but in my mind, I was expecting something far more casual. I won't go into too much detail of the evening other than to say I was able to have a few conversations here and there but not really get to meet large swathes of people- who all seemed to know each other. I did say hello to Sam, who was the CIPS president and with whom I had had a zoom call once before. He seemed to surround himself all evening with either pretty women or "chongster" males- telling me that he was more fun than his title suggested.  Perhaps too much fun for me, if you know what I mean. One day if I went out drinking with him, I would know for sure, but I could already tell he was a Chongster. This is a Singaporean technical term that denotes a particular type of male persona. Young at heart, fun loving, party loving, potentially looking to pick up women whenever and wherever- you get the drift.

He did not seem especially excited to see me- also something I felt but could not materially prove. I interrupted his conversation with a hot Russian number- maybe that irritated him. Later on, I had a discussion with this Russian lady as well- turns out she was half Kazakh and worked for an Event management company. I discussed shop with her a bit, since we did need to have a call-off agreement with an event management company to coordinate all our events, of which we seemed to be having our fair share and then some. I made a note to introduce her to Maitha, our VP of Communications when I got back to the office.

I had one glass of white wine and two diet cokes. But I regret I didn't get any bites- of which there was some on offer. Sliders, Cheese, cured meats etc. Seemed delicious but I just couldn’t get enough courage to stuff my face. In retrospect it reminded me of a Shell event in Dubai on the rooftop of the Address hotel. There were more familiar faces there as they were all colleagues, and all drinking like fish. I even made a farewell speech to our outgoing Executive Vice President- whom I had never ever spoken to before. I can be a different animal, especially after red wine has made it into the belly. 

Around 9.30 pm, I made a quiet exit, waited around for my car and drove back home to eat some home cooked dinner. All in all, I showed up and at least now I can look forward to the next one. I don't regret going, but I think I could have, in retrospect made more of the meet. One wine simply wasnt enough. In terms of getting a measure of the crowd, I learnt that the event was sponsored by a company called Simfoni. I had never heard of it but pretended that I did. This morning, I looked it up. It happened to be an e-procurement company. This was embarrassing since we were in the middle of a tender for this service, but simfoni was not even on our bid list. Just told me how we do procurement around here. We invite only “friends”.  I am glad we didn’t get into more detailed conversation with Simfoni because I didn’t really have a good answer for why they were not on the list. I would have added more bidders but to be honest this product is not very differentiated anymore. Back in the day you had ARIBA that was the only game in town. Now there is a proliferation of cloud-based tools and there is really no way to pick one from another. The more important thing for me was to pick anyone- but do it fast and get on with the implementation and the ensuing transformation. Speed of delivery was far more key than the technology platform. I made a note to self to land this decision this week itself. I wanted to move ahead with the implementation from February and close by the end of the year