Will The Magi Take Back Their Gifts?

No, no, not those Magi.  At this time of year in the Western tradition, we automatically think of three guys on camels following a star.

But, over the past several months, one magus or another has decried the negative impacts of fuel costs and capacity limitations on shipper/carrier relationships and the potentially impaired ability of companies to deliver on the promise of their brands - at least in a timely and cost-manageable way.

Other magi might suggest that building genuinely collaborative supply chain relationships in the past could have spared forward-thinking companies the capacity pain, even if there's not much to do about the costs.  But, only a few have heeded the lesson, and the focus of attention has been on the negative rather than the positive.

Maybe that's the way journalism works, even in the trade press, and maybe there's more good proactive stuff going on out there than we know about.  But, for the moment, some magi are depressed, and their camels are restive.  Animals do read and react to  their owners' states of mind, you know.

Actually, anyone who had built solid carrier relationships in the past as, among other things, a good way to get through challenging times, would be a star worth following.