As people of working age around the globe are vaccinated and prepare to return to something like business as usual, the time has come to ask, ‘What will attracting and retaining the talent your organization needs to grow and succeed look like in the post-COVID world?’ It is a bigger question than you might think: Baby Boomers are retiring at an accelerating rate; Generation X is not far behind; the eldest Millennials are approaching their 40s, and the workers behind them have seen their education and career paths interrupted by both a global recession and a global pandemic on a…

Once upon a time corporate leadership was about setting a goal and demanding the company follow the boss’s top-down orders or fear capricious discipline. A lot of great companies were built that way a century ago, but not many of them have survived to the present, and fewer still continue to have an autocratic management system. In the modern global marketplace, productivity and competitive advantage depends on an educated and engaged workforce contributing their best efforts. Management enjoys an honest and open rapport with the people working for them and with them. They seek to attract top talent while holding…

Last September at the North American Supply Chain Executive Summit, held virtually, Shay Scott,  Executive Director, Global Supply Chain Institute, University of Tennessee moderated a panel discussion with Daniel Myers, the Retired EVP of Integrated Supply Chain of Mondelēz International, and Greg Smith, EVP, Supply Chain for Walmart U.S., on “The Supply Chain of the Future and Behaviors that Drives Excellence.” The whole conversation is worth watching, but today we want to pull out a quote about how Walmart is breaking down internal silos to better meet the needs of its customers: “The expectations of the customer are so high,…

For years now, the Digital Revolution, Industry 4.0, and IIoT have been the drumbeat buzzwords promising a steady march towards a promised land where no one ever holds a clipboard or manually inputs data into a spreadsheet ever again. Where the productivity of a facility increases by orders of magnitude, and the workforce is freed from mindless repetitive tasks to focus on new efficiencies and targeted process improvements. Where proactive and predictive maintenance is so reliable, only the older generations even remember what unexpected downtime means. At some point it is probably worth pausing to ask, “Are we there yet?…