Last night’s “Leaders, Followers, and Laggards” presentation left me confident that this blog is moving in the right direction. Presenter Chuck Poirier profiled the supply chain efforts of companies around the globe. They’re pushing the envelope on collaboration internally and externally. They’re as responsive as possible to customers, vendors, and employees. Enterprises that focus on sharing are beating enterprises that try to control everything from the top down.
Hit the library for tomorrow’s business strategies
I’d have enjoyed some Good to Great-style recommendations on how laggards can become leaders, but Chuck’s survey results were plenty eye-opening on their own. The successful business strategies Chuck outlined echoed some of the best books I’ve found since starting this blog a few months ago. Read Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization to understand internal collaboration. Read Wikinomics to see how end-to-end collaboration is the success and survival strategy for 21st century companies. Read Bioteams for insights on the uncanny teamwork and responsiveness found in nature.
Check out some highlights from Chuck’s speech, with links to Sharing at Work articles that echo them:
- Industry leaders optimized internal collaboration and the exchange of best practices long ago. Now they’ve moved on to sharing these practices up and down their supply chains with vendors, customers, and end users.
- Leaders constantly use lean manufacturing principles to trim their operations and discard processes that don’t add value.
- Laggards are stuck with “push model” production and distribution processes. We make a plan, we manufacture against it, we distribute against it, and then we come back at the end of the month to see how reality matched our guesses. Leaders are using pull models and real-time customer conversation to push response times over the top.
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