Days Of Peace, Love, And Music

Strolling the aisles of our local Whole Foods market the other day, I had two burning quesrions.  One was: Who left the gate to the commune open?  There were enough tie-dyed T-shirts and shifts to clothe an entire Grateful Dead audience.  The second was: Is conspicuous body art (tattoos to the uninitiated) a fast track to management in the Cheese Department?

But, seduced by the charcuterie, I soldiered on.  After a very pleasant exchange with a cashier of indeterminate persuasion, I stopped to reconsider my snarky air of superiority.  We are surrounded by more open diversity in dress, thought, style, social orientation, and ethnicity than ever before.  We’d better get used to it.

More than that, we’d better accept it.  Not long ago, it was considered enlightened to talk about “tolerance” in matters of diversity.  Ugly word, tolerance, connoting putting up with something (or someone) that’s not quite right, not quite the same as the rest of us, not quite as good as it should be.

Today, the real need is for embracing differences, not merely tolerating them.  I don’t mean ditzy gushing and singing “kumbaya.”  I do mean genuinely understanding and considering differences while working and living with diverse elements of our population.  It’s also completely okay to celebrate cultural differences, especially when the best coffee and pastries on the planet are part of the package.

Why is this important in thinking about business relationships?  Simple.  Not all of the organizations that would make excellent supply chain partners are just like our own organization.  Nor are all of the people in them just like us.  Cultures and styles will vary, and we can’t afford to let superficialities stand in the way of building great supply chains (presuming that core values and visions are compatible).

What’s your experience?  Are you involved in working relationships with “different” organizations?  What are the biggest challenges to effective interaction and integration?  Has your view of the world been broadened by the relationship?

More thoughts about diversity may be found at www.artvanbodegraven.com/publications (available soon).

Masters of the Obvious Take the Stage

It has become fashionable - even a cliche - to opine, as if a new tablet had been discovered on the Mount, that "Companies don't compete against other companies any longer; supply chains compete against other supply chains."  C'mon guys, that pseudo-aha moment was already passe by the end of the last century.

What we need to be focusing on in the 21^st century is how to leverage business relationships to further optimize the power – and outcomes – of end-to-end supply chain performance.  The supply chain world has an enormous advantage in being able to create multi-directional business relationships; it is not confined to the more traditional arena of customer relationship constructs.  A player in any given supply chain can have the potential to build upstream relationships with suppliers, as well as downstream with customers.  And, the prevalence of 3^rd Party Logistics (3PL) service providers in logistics and supply chain operations and planning introduces still more powerful relationship opportunities.

So, where are you in the realm of supply chain opportunities for business relationships?  Are you a prisoner of where you are in the chain?  Does an ultimate customer dominate – or trump – what you’d like to do with relationships?  Are you a weak player on a strong team?  Are you seeing potential breakthroughs, or substantial improvements, in prospective supply chain business relationships?