A Professional Interview with Natasha Taneka – Session 2
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Natasha Taneka (Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2016/05/05
With regards to professional life, your father with respect to work to mineralogy at the Imperial College in London and your mother in the United States in terms of human resources management and the arts. Those are very different as you pointed out at the end of the last interview. If at all, or to what degree, did these influence your own decisions to do with human procurement in professional life?
That’s a very good question. I’ve always known that for them to have picked two different, very different, disciplines. It is always been the larger spectrum. I’m very grateful that both of them weren’t in the arts because otherwise maybe growing up I would’ve only thought that my only options were the arts, or vice versa. Both of them being in the arts and mathematics.
Them being in the opposite spectrums has allowed me to dabble in the both worlds. So,I’ve always had an interest and enjoyed sitting down with my father and watching science documentaries on mathematics and at the same time I really did enjoy the human aspect of what my mother was involved in.
Understanding how decisions are made in the home, family planning, I think that sort of allowed me to cultivate my people skills! I do enjoy hanging out with people and talking to people about different things physically rather than in the abstract.
So with my career now in procurement and supply chain, I feel like I get a little bit of both. And so when it comes to contracts, I have to deal with numbers. You have to suspend what a suppliers… You have to see the risk. You have the see the rates that are being given, what you are negotiating will be your deterrent. There is a lot of mathematics that I have to deal with and I think that’s useful from my influence from my father.
I am very interested in dealing with people. You have to be on the phone to get a supplier and then you have to actually get suppliers that want to help you, but you have to work on your listening skills to learn how they do business and that they have other options that your value chain partner hasn’t thought of, and so in that case I am using my influence from my mom’s background and working with people and learning that they come from different perspectives.
The two of them, I think, givens me good balance that numbers are important and do speak a lot and louder than, at times, what people say. In time, if you want t get more done, you have to understand that picking up the phone and having a rapport with people and listening to where they’re coming from is just as important to a project that they have to complete.
So, in my daily life, I use a little bit of both my father’s background and my mother’s background.
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