The founder and CEO of Starbucks was a head-liner at this week's Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) annual conference.
Reflecting on Starbucks' near-death and strong recovery, DCVelocity reports that Howard Schultz told the crowd, "Growth and success covers up mistakes," At Starbucks this included a supply chain that was mostly unknown. It was an ignorance for which they paid dearly. Only on the edge of failure did the company finally take its supply chain seriously. Schultz now credits supply chain management as the "primary co-author of our business. You cannot scale a company of any kind without the skills and base of a supply chain."
Schultz continued, "Given the fact that the Internet as we know it today is literally the death of distance, and that distance is getting narrower and narrower in terms of the last ten feet, …that is now being linked to delivery, specifically short-term delivery that could be in an hour or 30 minutes. With all these things going on, it won’t be status quo as we know it today."
In my own experience the biggest impediment to improving supply chain resilience is success. The greater the success, the less time, energy, or inclination remains for the self-critique and perspective that informs resilient choices.
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