Interim Manager & Consultant for Procurement and Global Supply Chain | Cost Savings, Risk Reduction & Negotiation Expertise
Joined January 2025
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"I'm not my title, I'm not my job, I'm not my company.
I am Panos. You can fire me yesterday, and I'll find something else to do."
Panos Anastasiou, CPO of Opella (€3bn spend), on the ultimate career button.
Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=Q-bZEMu0…
The interesting part: he's not leaving. He runs €3bn and stays - but negotiates and speaks up like someone who could walk. The option is the unlock, not the exit.
More like this: cpo-path.beehiiv.com/subscri…
I am so bad at sales that I now follow @danmartell’s advice.
I am trying to get 100 "no" answers by cold calling businesses every day for 30 days straight, Monday through Friday.
Anyone wanna join this journey or watch me suffer?
"I don't like you. You talk too much. You're too opinionated. Shut up, or you will not make probation."
November 2006.
Twenty years later he's a CPO running €3bn in spend. He says it worked.
Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=Q-bZEMu0…
He doesn't defend the delivery.
But he does raise the harder question:
most of us only ever get the sanded-down version of feedback, then wonder for years why we're not moving.
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A CPO managing €3 billion in spend told me how he got there:
"I shoveled shit. And it was intentional - every time."
McCain had hired him for Chicago. Family trip done, school picked. Then the CPO called: "I need you to go to Lille instead." Potato country. Middle of nowhere.
He went.
From Episode 1 of The CPO Interviews - two hours with Panos Anastasiou, CPO of Opella.
Uncut, because that's when people say what they actually think.
Agree with his rule — or have you seen it fail?
(Full interview and newsletter in the next comment.)
🎧 Full interview (1h47, uncut) YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=Q-bZEMu0…
🎧 Full interview (1h47, uncut) Spotify:
open.spotify.com/episode/4Rk…
📩 Weekly procurement intelligence — ProcWee: procwee.beehiiv.com/?utm_sou…
🧭 The executive career letter — CPO Path: cpo-path.beehiiv.com/?utm_so…
Guest: Panos Anastasiou — linkedin.com/in/panosanastas…
"Never throw more money for them to stay. They're not staying for the money."
Panos Anastasiou, CPO of Opella (€3bn spend), on why counter-offers buy you two months and nothing else.
Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=Q-bZEMu0…
The part people miss: he'd just given this person a promotion and 15%. They took it.
And he still says: if they leave in a year, I'll celebrate it.
More like this: cpo-path.beehiiv.com/subscri…
A product launch is rarely just a marketing or engineering milestone.
It is the first moment where the whole operating system is tested:
Can suppliers react fast enough?
Can capacity follow demand?
Do cost assumptions survive ramp-up?
Does service readiness hold after the first delivery?
This is where procurement’s earlier work becomes visible.
Not as internal process quality.
As market performance.
ProcWee™ #125 looks at Stage 5 / Launch and Post-Launch Review and shows how procurement teams can turn launch symptoms into better supplier, cost and PDP decisions for the next product path.
Published today at 11:00 am ET. Access here (it's free but you have to sign up):
procwee.beehiiv.com/p/stage-…
By the time validation fails, the budget is usually already under pressure.
The launch date is exposed.
The supplier is defending timelines.
Engineering is reworking details.
Procurement is asked to “fix it fast.”
But Gate 5 in the Stage-Gate-Process rarely creates the weakness.
It reveals what was locked in earlier:
Lead times copied from quotes.
Prototype suppliers treated as serial suppliers.
Fallbacks approved commercially but never validated operationally.
QA/QC capacity ignored until release becomes the bottleneck.
ProcWee™ #124 looks at Testing & Validation as a supplier, cost, and launch-readiness check, not only as a technical gate.
Published today at 11:15 am ET.
Access here (it's free but you have to sign up):
procwee.beehiiv.com/p/stage-…
In manufacturing, procurement leverage often disappears before the RFQ is sent.
By Gate 4 in product development, many commercial options may already be narrowing:
specifications
tooling assumptions
supplier workstreams
qualification paths
design changes
fallback-source logic
That is why Stage 3 / Development is not only an engineering phase:
It is also the point where companies can still test whether technical progress is aligned with supplier capability, manufacturability, sourcing optionality, change control, and cost credibility.
If this alignment is weak, procurement often receives the issue later as price pressure, supplier recovery, expediting, or late commercial correction.
This week’s ProcWee™ looks at Stage 3 / Development and Gate 4 in the Product Development Process, so:
For procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, and operations leaders who want sharper weekly intelligence on cost, suppliers, execution, and industrial decision quality:
Read the whole episode here for free: procwee.beehiiv.com/p/stage-…
How often have you sat in a meeting and realized that the project scope, strategy, and brainstorming had already been decided without you?
And that’s not all: now they have tasks for you. Specific tasks.
How can you prevent this from happening to your employees?
Late involvement rarely means you have no value left. It means the room to shape the decision is smaller.
A supplier path may already be forming. A technical route may already have internal sponsors. A business case may already contain numbers that nobody wants to reopen.
So?
The difference is important. Earlier involvement is not mainly won through a new meeting invite. It is won when procurement gives other functions a reason to bring it in before they have to.
Do you give your stakeholders a reason?
Find some in our today's episode:
CPO Path #8, from 10:50 am ET here: cpo-path.beehiiv.com/archive