My guest on the show today is Walt Charles, the Chief Procurement Officer at Biogen. Walt will be well known to a number of listeners – he is a long time CPO with such illustrious companies as Johnson & Johnson's Consumer Division, Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, and now at Biogen.

As you will hear in the interview, Walt is very passionate about the potential power of procurement, but also believes that some of our more traditional approaches – such as the parent principle - may no longer be fit for purpose.

Walt has achieved significant results throughout his career by redesigning processes and investing in enabling tools and technology.

In our interview we talk about the "how", with a specific focus today on tools and technology. But in the first part of the interview, I wanted to dig a little deeper into Walt's background, and his philosophies as a leader.