Shilpan Amin sits at the operational core of General Motors. As the global chief procurement and supply chain officer, his remit cuts across engineering, manufacturing, finance, and the company’s vast supplier network. At GM’s scale, procurement is not simply about buying parts. It determines how capital is deployed, how risk is priced and absorbed, how quickly vehicles move from design to launch, and how the company navigates geopolitical shocks while protecting long-term margins.
In an industry reshaped by electrification, semiconductor shortages, and geopolitical volatility, operational precision can be a competitive edge.
Amin’s career spans marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain, a range of roles that have widened his aperture on how the company operates. Moving across both commercial and operational disciplines gave him a view of how decisions in one function reverberate through others. The common thread, he says, has been attention to the environment he creates. He does not reduce leadership to hitting quarterly metrics. He focuses on whether teams understand how their work connects to enterprise goals and whether that connection is clear to others.
“Culture is actually more important than measuring results,” Amin said in a wide-ranging conversation on the Fortune Next to Lead series. “If you create a strong culture and an environment where everyone can bring their best self to work, the results will come. In fact, the results will exceed anyone’s expectations.”
For Amin, culture is operational. It shows up in whether information moves across functions and whether progress is visible beyond a single team. In a company the size of GM, clarity is what allows strategy to translate into coordinated execution.
Within his first decade at GM, Amin was leading his first product launch after moving into interior engineering. He believed the program was on track. What he failed to do, he recalls, was make engineering’s progress visible to the rest of the organization.
“Because of that, it was creating anxiety in other parts of the organization,” Amin says.
A manufacturing leader later told Amin he had been close to asking him to leave until clearer communication made his team’s contribution explicit. The issue was not technical performance, but translation. Other functions could not see how engineering’s work advanced the broader business, and that disconnect created friction.
The takeaway proved lasting: Strong results within a single function are not enough if peers cannot connect that work to shared objectives. In large organizations, visibility and alignment are operating requirements.
After that experience, Amin made it a priority to explain his team’s work across functions and to give direct feedback that sharpened performance. He also credits GM CEO Mary Barra with reinforcing a standard that shapes how he leads meetings: “When you come to the table, when you’re at a meeting, you need to drop your titles and roles at the door.”
At large companies, Amin believes hierarchy can slow decisions. Removing titles changes the dynamic in the room and improves the quality of the group convening.
That expectation now defines his team. He looks for leaders who are bold and willing to state their views clearly, even when they run counter to the prevailing opinion.
A case study he encountered during an executive education program at Stanford University reinforced this point. The quietest voice can meaningfully shape the outcome of a decision, so leaders have to structure meetings so those voices are heard.
In complex supply chains, Amin sees suppressed dissent as a source of risk. He expects rigorous debate before a decision is made and full alignment after it. Tension is part of execution, he argues, and once the decision is made, the team moves.
He applies the same standard to himself. “I love to debate, and sometimes I debate, and I tell my team this openly, I’ll actually share a perspective I don’t believe in, just to make sure all views are thought of.”
