DC Velocity - November 2016

next level of talent—the analysts, planners, and schedulers; the sourcers (not sorcerers, btw) and procurers; the relationship points of the spear; the collegial internal collaborators; the transport mavens; the project managers and S&OP (sales and operations planning) savants; and the like. And creating supply chain managers is largely a game of chance, the luck of right place/right time experience, coupled with fortuitous on-the-job learning.

And in a universe abuzz with drones, the hum of robots, and the clink/clank of sundry material handling contraptions, we are utterly failing at developing designers, repair people, installers, and the coders who make things stop going bump in the night.

The greatest human infrastructure gap? By far, our collective inability to take ordinary people and teach them to do the extraordinary, to become supply chain leaders— passionate visionaries with powers of persuasion and magnetic attraction for followers.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Until and unless we develop people to the extent that we have developed roads and bridges, and technology hardware and software, the other infrastructure imperatives will remain relatively meaningless. So, let’s get to it and figure out how to teach leaders to lead, managers to manage, and technogeeks to make bits and bytes do our bidding.

We cannot afford to cede the output of brainpower to offshore geniuses and let our best and brightest chillax while highly motivated technocrats from other lands learn enough to power their homelands to heights of supply chain excellence.

Time to get real. We can’t—and won’t in the future— satisfy the consumerist hunger of our home market, nor will we be a commanding player in global competition. Can we afford to become Greece or operate on a par with Portugal? Really? Are those your visions for a supply chain future?

THE ROLE(S) OF EVOLVING INFRASTRUCTURE PRIORITIES

We have a plate overflowing with infrastructure challenges, a legacy of neglect, a history of looking into the rear-view mirror, a failure to see the demands of tomorrow, a distorted view of skills needs, an unrealistic hope that tomorrow’s blue-collar, well-paying jobs will translate to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) knowledge that helps define the 21st century economy in a planetary context. Is it too late? One hopes not, but vision, leadership, and individual initiative will be essential to survival, imho.

Art van Bodegraven is, among other roles, chief design officer for the DES Leadership Academy; he can be reached at (614) 893-9414 or avan@columbus. rr.com. His website is www.artvanbodegraven.com.

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