DC Velocity - March 2010

thoughtleaders
BY MITCH MAC DONALD, GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

looking at the flip side

interview with Peter Sheahan

Forget the tried and true, says Peter Sheahan. Sometimes, success
lies in turning everything you know about business on its head.

IF YOU WANT YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED, YOU CALL IN A CONSULTANT. BUT who do you call if you want your answers questioned? For some of the world’s biggest companies, the answer is Peter Sheahan.

Sheahan, who will speak at the Warehousing Education and Research Council’s (WERC) Annual Conference in May, has built a career out of challenging business leaders to rethink their assumptions and find innovative ways of doing business. He currently heads up his own international consulting practice, where he helps clients like Google, Hilton Hotels, and Harley Davidson learn how to “flip” their thinking and find opportunity where others cannot.

Sheahan is also active on the lecture circuit, having delivered more than 2,000 presentations to over 300,000 people in 15 different countries to date. In 2006, his peers voted him Australia’s National Speakers Association Keynote Speaker of the Year.

In addition, he has written six books, including the best-sellers Fl!p: How to Turn Everything You Know on its Head—and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings and Generation Y: Thriving (and Surviving) With Generation Y at Work. Sheahan spoke recently with DC VELOCITY Group Editorial Director Mitch Mac Donald about what businesses can learn from Wal-Mart, Zara, and (yes, we’re serious) Tiger Woods.

QIn your best-seller Flip, you argue that business today requires new perspec- tives. Could you talk a little about how logistics and supply chain management fits into that?

AI think in the past—in the boom times of the mid 2000s and then leading into, say, early 2008—a lot of change initiatives were built around cultural transformation, which I am a really big fan of, by the way. But I think you’re going to find in the next 25 years, the focus will be on how to extract more value out of existing business models and at the same time, extract or find new value from alternative business models. Both of those questions will lead back to supply chain, distribution, and logistics. So I think that is the first thing for a logistics executive to understand—that you will be at the center of competitive advantage moving forward.