THE DEMANDS OF A SENIOR CORPOrate management position typically leave little time for outside activities, but Reuben
Slone hasn’t let that stand in his way. While
holding down executive-level jobs at General
Motors, Whirlpool, and now OfficeMax,
where he serves as executive vice president of
supply chain, Slone has also been a frequent
speaker and writer. He has written two well-received Harvard Business Review articles:
“Leading a Supply Chain Turnaround” in
October 2004 and “Are You the Weakest Link in Your
Company’s Supply Chain?” in September 2007. This past
May saw the publication of his first book, co-authored with
Paul Dittmann and the late John T. Mentzer, The New Supply
Chain Agenda, which grew out of the “Weakest Link” article.
Slone views writing and speaking not just as a way to give
back to the profession but also as part of his own learning
process. “The work [of writing] is the grist for my mill,” he
says. “The writing is the refinement of my ideas. That’s how
I keep current.”
Reuben Slone
States. The more technical thing that’s unique
is linking supply chain performance to shareholder value by economic profit.
QDo you think supply chain practition- ers pay sufficient attention to economic profit and shareholder value?
A It does not get enough attention—and not just from the supply chain practitioner but also from the CEO and the boards
of supply chain-intensive companies.
My wife was the one who challenged me to write the
“Weakest Link” article [which the book grew out of]. And
her haunting question to me was: “When you were at
General Motors and Whirlpool, why did you always have to
explain to the CEO what it is you did and why you did it?”
And I said, “Wow, that’s a great question.”
QIs writing something you would recommend to other supply chain practitioners?
A I would recommend it to anyone. Frankly, it’s not just writing; it’s speaking and dialoguing. I find it almost
invaluable to take ideas and present them to a group and then
be hammered with questions. That’s the way I learn—through
dialogue and discussion. That’s also the way I like to lead organizations. As long as you have a foundation of respect, you need
to have debate because many minds think better than one.
QYour book is titled The New Supply Chain Agenda. What makes this agenda new?
A This is meant to be a no-jargon book. There are a lot of books written on supply chain, but not so many that
you could read on a cross-country trip across the United
QHow have you promoted the importance of the sup- ply chain to shareholder value at the companies
you’ve worked with?
A At the end of the day, it’s really built around the results that you drive, and there’s a simple hierarchy of results
for any well-functioning supply chain. The first is availability,
the second is doing that at an optimal level of inventory, and
the third is doing that at the optimal level of cost. So if you run
that as an optimization problem, it’s, “What is the appropriate
availability at the optimal inventory and cost in the system?”
What’s interesting is that at many of the manufacturing
companies that I’ve either worked at or consulted for, the
CEO runs that algorithm precisely in reverse: “Give me the
lowest-cost supply chain, and then we’ll address our inventory and availability of our product.” But that actually gives you
a very inefficient supply chain. I used to say, “Well, the
reductio ad absurdum argument for that is if we don’t ship all year,
I can return three-fourths of a billion dollars. Is that what
you want? Because that is the lowest-cost supply chain.”
Wesley Randall
WE’RE ALL FAMILIAR WITH THE OLD
saying, “Those who can, do. Those who
can’t, teach.” Wesley Randall, assistant professor of supply chain management at
Auburn University, is the exception: He can
do both.
Randall spent 20 years as a logistician in
the Air Force, retiring as a lieutenant colonel
after leadership tours that included support-
ing combat operations in Southwest Asia
and the Balkans and serving as chief of engi-
neering management for NATO’s Airborne Warning and
Control System. Along the way, he earned
two master’s degrees and a Ph.D.
