Who I Am
I am Ignacio Arenas — an engineer by training, a supply chain executive by profession, and a communicator by conviction.
My career started in the technical trenches: managing aerospace programs at Airbus, developing telecoms software at Ericsson, and running customer projects in Tokyo. Those early years gave me something that pure procurement professionals rarely have — a genuine understanding of what happens on the engineering and operations side of the table.
Over the past decade, I brought that perspective into sourcing and procurement. At Flowserve, a $4 billion flow control manufacturer, I eventually led global procurement for the Pump Division — a team of 200+ professionals across 13 countries managing a multi-hundred-million dollar spend portfolio. Today I am Strategic Sourcing Director at Sidel, responsible for a €200M+ global portfolio of drawing-based materials.
I believe that sustainable results come from three things: rigorous data, solid processes, and people who are genuinely aligned — not just coordinated. That conviction has shaped every team I have led and every decision I have made.
A Global Perspective
I have not just visited the world — I have worked in it. Living and operating across Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Japan taught me something that no classroom or textbook could: that the hardest part of global business is never the strategy. It is the communication. How you build trust across cultures. How you navigate silence in a Tokyo negotiation. How you align a team of 40 people in four countries around a common goal when everyone defines “urgency” differently.
Those experiences are the invisible thread running through everything I write here.
Why This Blog?
I created this space because I believe that complex ideas deserve to be explained well — and that the best explanations rarely come from textbooks.
You will find posts here that use a Van Halen concert rider to explain risk management, a giant crystal geode discovered in Almería to illustrate operations bottlenecks, and a Leica camera crisis to reframe how we think about strategic decisions. Not because business needs to be entertaining, but because a well-chosen story makes an idea stick in a way that a framework never quite does.
I write about Strategic Sourcing, Global Supply Chain, Leadership, Operations, and the future of work — for practitioners who want to think more clearly, and for students who want to understand how these concepts actually work in the real world.
Beyond the Office
Public speaking is not just something I do — it is something I study. I have been an active Toastmasters member for years, and for nearly five years I organised and curated Ignite Madrid, one of the city’s most distinctive public speaking events. I coached speakers, produced eight editions, and built an audience of 400+ people who came specifically to see complex ideas explained in five minutes or less. That discipline — making something complicated genuinely clear — is what this blog is about too.
When I step away from work entirely, you will find me on the water. Sailing teaches you things about teamwork and decision-making under uncertainty that no leadership course can replicate. And occasionally, I have a camera in hand — trying to capture the kind of moment that reminds you why the journey matters.
If something you read here makes you think differently about a problem you are facing, this blog has done its job.
