Flexible HEALING

If you’re feeling nervous about the supply chain, try picturing it naked

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There’s a tension at the heart of supply chain management between rigidity—the hard power ideal of getting things done—and flexibility, the soft power which allows for both change and disruption. That tension, in turn, is shaped by the field’s invisibility: Managers prefer to see less of the nuts and bolts, and customers prefer to see none.

The result is a bias towards rigidity. But this is limiting: The kind of supply chain that could withstand a challenge would be one that could bend before change without breaking.

GET REAL

Despite the overwhelming complexity of the logistics corporations routinely manage, such a system is mostly theoretical. Most major companies would face unmanageable losses in the event of a natural disaster or security breach that substantially affects their supply chain—losses that could have been prevented if the underlying systems were capable of planning for change.