Building on a legacy

IBM’s Michael Robinson earns NMSDC’s Minority Supplier Development Leader of the Year award

On any given day, you will find Michael Robinson within the walls of the IBM Corporation ardently responding to phone calls and e-mails, participating in internal meetings, and working with procurement councils. Robinson devotes his time to educating both his internal and external customers as he mentors his teams to help them reach pre-determined goals.

He is the recipient of the 2007 National Minority Supplier Development Council’s coveted and distinguished Minority Supplier Development Leader of the Year award, an honor bestowed on Robinson by his peers within the NMSDC network. In all that he does, Robinson is a passionate champion of supplier diversity.

No better place for Robinson to channel this passion than IBM, where he is the director of global supplier diversity. Known by his industry supplier diversity professionals as a modest man who is always the consummate consensus builder, Robinson takes great pride in steering a global program that bought in excess of $2 billion from diversified suppliers in 2007.

Both Robinson and IBM are dedicated to every client’s success, understanding that providing opportunities to diverse suppliers has a great impact on communities. The supplier diversity leader is driven by IBM’s core value system that promotes trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.

“I look at it as my job to help diverse suppliers grow,” Robinson said. “I explain to them what they need to do to be a successful supplier in the corporate world. And the trust and personal responsibility in all relationships – I take to heart.”

Supporting Robinson and his charge to progressively cultivate IBM’s diverse supply chain is a network of multicultural professionals who stand committed to carrying out the corporation’s initiatives. He looks at IBM’s history of hiring on the basis of talent and capability that dates back to 1899, when it hired the first woman and the first African-American employee, as an indicator of the corporation’s dedication to valuing differences.

“If you don’t have a fantastic and diverse workforce and respect diversity within the company, how will you respect diversity outside of the company?” Robinson asked. “Unless a company ‘walks the talk’ with its own internal workforce, it can’t respect an external supplier.”

Innovation spurs growth
Marking a 40-year supplier diversity benchmark, IBM looks to innovation as a mechanism for pushing its program to the next level, instituting new paradigms to help diverse suppliers succeed in the competitive marketplace. As such, it has collaborated with the NMSDC and has sponsored trade missions to places like China, Brazil and South Africa, where it brought diverse suppliers to partner with suppliers from those respective countries. The industry leader is also participating in the Tuck School at Dartmouth College/ Women’s Business Enterprise National Council Executive Training program that brings women to IBM Palisades, the Executive Training Institute in New York for a week of intensive training. IBM is looking beyond the obvious and “pealing back the onion,” as Robinson described, to make sure that the playing field is level for women and minority suppliers.

“We understand that growing suppliers includes more than just purchasing from them; purchasing is just one component,” Robinson explained. “It’s also about providing them with education and knowledge, and letting them know what’s going on in the global business environment. We make sure that they are given opportunities and that the supplier, whomever we choose, is chosen because they bring a value-added service or product to IBM.”

Robinson continued, “That’s one thing our diverse suppliers understand about us – that we will give you an opportunity. If you come in and understand the business, if your product or service fits into our supply chain and you can give us that value – you will be given an opportunity.”

IBM’s place as an industry innovator is further evidenced by the fact that it is the only technology company to hold a seat at the Billion Dollar Roundtable, an organization comprised of the nation’s corporations who spend $1 billion or more annually with diverse suppliers. Robinson takes pride in this milestone, yet remains focused on taking the company to the next level.

“We’re doing everything we can to advance our goals and objectives and IBM now spends more than $2.3 billion a year on diverse suppliers,” he said. “We’d like to continue to grow the spend even more. Bringing together a community of diverse suppliers increases our opportunities to hear different ideas and to apply different approaches to gain access to different market places.”

As IBM pushes supplier diversity forward, and as Robinson navigates the program, diverse suppliers are primed for increased access to the corporation’s supply chain — provided they do their part.

“Know your business – that is key,” Robinson cautioned. “Understand your business; understand the competition; and understand your customer. If you understand your customer, you understand where your customer is going. If you are a supplier to IBM, you understand we are doing business in other countries because that is where our customers want us to provide them the best value at the lowest cost.”

Robinson described these items as simple pointers that suppliers often overlook. Yet, when the suppliers and the diversity professionals work together, including the CEO, supplier diversity objectives become a reality.

“You need a supplier diversity officer and an [organization] that supports the processes, the guidelines, the procedures that are in place,” he said. “Everybody from the top-down, bottom-up, has to believe in it. And that’s one thing that IBM does. Sam Palmisano, our CEO, believes in it.”

The organization about which Robinson speaks did not go unnoticed at the 2007 NMSDC conference. An overwhelmed, surprised and humbled Robinson shared the award with his team, including Palmisano, who Robinson referenced by name.

“I thanked the whole team,” Robinson recalled, “because even though [the award] was recognizing me, everyone played a part in it.”