The Boxer

The Kid's older sister swooshed through the kitchen and stopped, frozen, as if Justin Bieber had popped up out of the cookie jar.  Her mother was listening to the older-than-oldies local FM station, with the haunting Simon and Garfunkel refrain of "lie, lie, lie" echoing through the room, prompting a somewhat outraged query of "Who's doing that cover of the Mumford & Sons' song?  I love it!"

Explaining in the teen universe gets a bit complex, so everyone moved on quietly.  But, I was moved to think about how often concepts in our supply chain space turn out to be another version of "what's old is new again."

However, when ideas that were conceived years, even decades, ago do spring up anew, the song tells a familiar story: "Still a man hears what he wants to hear; And disregards the rest."  Abetted by academics, the trade press, and consultants looking for the next bandwagon to hop on, some of these "breakthoughs" enjoy renaissances, and can provide value when applied in a more receptive generation. 

And, frankly, there are cases in which the original version was not terribly useful in practice, requiring today's technology to become actionable in everyday processes.  Think the cloud, big data, manufacturing run strategies, rationalizations of SKUs or suppliers or customers or whatever, real-time event analysis and response, probabalistic forecasting, and so on.

For those of a certain age, though, afflicted with either very good memories or a touch of dementia, the core elements are recognizable.  And we feel compelled to bring people back to the historical context of whatever the latest silver bullet might be.

In the, once again, words of the song " . . . the fighter still remains."