DC Velocity - June 2016

I’VE BEEN INCREASINGLY DISMAYED BY THE MUCH-HER-alded and little-resolved skills and experience shortfalls in The Great Supply Chain Management Race—the so-called talent gap.

The “gap” terminology obscures the depth and severity of the challenge. It’s a chasm, a gaping crack in the infrastructure. We don’t have enough warm bodies to perform the simplest execution tasks, with a further dropoff in adequate numbers when basic arithmetic and/or communication abilities are added to organizational expectations—and needs.

When higher skill levels are requirements for analysis, planning, coding, data management, and other such esoterica, the situation becomes downright embarrassing—and dangerously vulnerable in poach our best and brightest without the merest twinge of conscience).

Of course, our managers at various levels are oblivious to factors of time and change, and what it takes to be effective in the 21st century, wedded as they are to discredited models of yesteryear. That old practices and shopworn tactics serve to drive off otherwise enthusiastic and engaged staff only makes things worse.

And our greatest deficiency remains, imho, the yawning abyss of the authentic leadership we crave and have little chance of finding. That shortfall creates a domino cascade of talent shortage throughout an organization.

HOOVERVILLE REDUX

Meanwhile, unemployment is pervasive enough that accounting trickeration is necessary to disguise that a pleasingly plump image is actually morbidly obese. The almost-always-ballyhooed unemployment rate is a pleasant fiction that has little genuine meaning or utility. It, for example, does not recognize the underemployed or the discouraged who no longer bother seeking employment. The portion of the population able to work that is actually working is a frail 62. 7 percent and continues to drop.