State and Local Supply Chains Challenged by the Pandemic

In this episode, I get to interview Brian Utley, CEO and Founder of Periscope Holdings, about the unique challenges government supply chains, especially state, city and local are having during the COVID-19 pandemics.  Brian shares how government-centric supply chain ecosystems are working together to solve these issues and to develop new strategies.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Pandemic Resilience is Knowing When to Quit

Thomas Edison

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be a more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks." ~ Warren Buffet

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties.  It doesn’t, however, require you to return to a previous state.  Often the fastest way to recover is to quit and start again.  Think of a jeep climbing a steep muddy hillside.  Mid-way up the hill, tires spinning it comes to a stop.  In this situation your choice is often limited to staying in the same spot spinning your wheels or quitting and trying again.  Life often provides us with similar choices, and the COVID-19 pandemic will force many businesses to face this decision.  

Let’s talk about the role quitting plays in resilience.  As a youth I was taught that with enough hard work, belief and long hours anything could be accomplished.  Now as a veteran high-tech executive with thirty plus years of experience I no longer hold that maxim to be true.  Some businesses are just bad ideas.  Some good ideas are before their time.  Sometimes people in leadership positions shouldn’t be.  Some ideas just run out of money before they get to market.  Some good ideas just can’t rise above the noise and fade off into oblivion.  Sometimes pandemics happen.

Ecosystem Commerce and Pandemic Supply Chains - Interview with TCS Expert Rich Sherman

In this episode, I interview Rich Sherman, Senior Fellow at the Supply Chain Centre of Excellence at TCS.  He shares his insights on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on global supply chains and what can be done in the future to make them more resilient, adaptable and redundant.

 

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Steps Required to Stop and or Live with the Pandemic

Common Good

We have all learned a great deal about living with and fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.  Not everything for sure, but enough to start sketching a plan for the guaranteed next one.  We don't ever want to be in a situation again where we must decide between our lives or a functioning economy.  We also recognize that both COVID-19 and poverty have their own associated health risks, so let's try to balance both concerns.

A working plan seems to be emerging from the fog of war.  It isn't fun.  It requires isolating those that feel sick, those that test positive, and those that are in contact with those that test positive.

This plan is also written without due consideration for individual liberties.  It is simply a list of what works to stop the virus from spreading, while keeping the economy functioning long enough for effective treatments and vaccines to be developed and "herd immunity" achieved.  An implementation of this plan, however, would need to balance the concerns for individual liberties against the common good. 

This plan is not original.  It is the aggregate of what has already been widely reported and argued to be working.  I have simply collected them in this living document and will continue to add, subtract and edit as we gain better insights.

Pre-Pandemic Assumptions and Presumptions

Over the last 3 years my wife and I have become avid backpackers with many adventures under our belt.  One of the biggest surprises I learned during my time in the wilderness was how often I make wrong assumptions.

It was mid-July and the lake we were backpacking to was still frozen over and the trail was covered in deep snow.  I had assumed warm mid-July weather would have cleared the trails.  Another time after fishing in a high mountain lake, I looked at the map and saw the trail passed directly above our location.  After over an hour looking for the trail we realized it didn't exist.  My assumptions that maps are updated regularly and accurately reflect the reality on the ground were wrong.  I can't tell you how many times I have learned that the obvious shortcut doesn't save you time.

We all make assumptions.  We assume something is true or certain to happen, without proof.  We also make presumptions.  We presume ideas are true, and then use them as the basis for other ideas until we have built ourselves a house of cards that is one fact away from collapsing.  As we ponder our changed mid-pandemic world from our home offices with our dogs and kids under our desk, it is a good time to reflect on the assumptions and presumptions that got us into this predicament.  

I think we presumed the biggest dangers in flying were potential terrorist attacks or equipment failure.  I think we assumed our doctors had the answers to whatever illness we picked up.  I think we presumed that since all companies seemed to be developing long and lean supply chains that they must be resilient, redundant and reliable.  I think we presumed that an illness in China was a Chinese problem.  I think we assumed that the local hospital could just order and quickly receive any supplies or equipment they needed.  I think we assumed that our economy would always be there in the morning.  I think we assumed toilet paper would always be available. I think we assumed our leaders had a plan.

As our anxiety evolves into acceptance of our mid-pandemic situation, perhaps it is a good time to re-evaluate the assumptions and presumptions we all have about the world around us.  What I have learned in this past month is we have far less control over our world and destiny than might have been presumed.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Flattening the Curve of a Risky Future

Today, in the midst of round one of the COVID-19 pandemic, I received an email from Delta Airlines sharing their efforts to make travel safe and normal. What will normal be post-pandemic?  Will society be comfortable going right back to flying all over the world again?  The thought of spending time in crowded airports, attending conferences with tens of thousands of people in one room, sitting in tightly packed business meetings and sitting elbow to elbow with coughing strangers on planes fills me with anxiety.  I don't think I am the same person that I once was.  I suspect most of us aren't.

As the pandemic and resulting economic anxieties extend further into the calendar and deeper into our mutual psyches, our habits will be altered - some temporarily, others permanent.  Just as our grandparents (and great-grandparents) before them developed a propensity to save and to be financially conservative as a result of experiencing the Great Depression during their formative years, we also will be known for the changes about to take place in us.  This pandemic will alter the curve of our future.

We have now all borne witness to the results of our societal decisions or lack thereof, and experienced the consequences.  I am reminded of a popular Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus.  They were imprisoned in a tower by the King of Crete.  Being a great craftsman, Daedalus devised two pairs of wings using wooden frames, wax and feathers to escape and fly away.  Daedalus warned his son Icarus that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt and the wings would fail.  Icarus jumped from the tower, escaped and his wings allowed him to soar high over the ocean.  

It was not long, however, before Icarus forgot all about his father's warnings.  Soon he was flying higher and higher.  The warm sun quickly melted the wax, the feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.  I think today we may have flown too close to the sun.

In 2015, Bill Gates, gave a Ted Talk titled "The Next Outbreak? We're Not Ready."  It accurately described what would happen if a pandemic similar to COVID-19 occurred.  He precisely warned of the impact and what the world needed to do to prepare for it.  Bill Gates was our Daedalus, and like Icarus we were captivated by the joys and excitement of flying high and far.  The question for us all now is - what next?  What will we do differently?  How will our future be reshaped?

After taking some time for lamenting and learning, we must go forward into the future wiser.  My friend and supply chain risk expert Joe Carson, who I recently interviewed in this blog post titled, A Mid-Pandemic Interview with Supply Chain Risk Expert Joe Carson, often encourages organizations to develop a "Risk Culture."  A culture of studying risk, identifying risk, understanding risk, planning for risk, and factoring in the cost of risk mitigation. 

The lasting impression we all may be left with post-pandemic is that risk is not just a hypothetical, but real.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A Faustian Bargain Involving Privacy, Pandemic and a Functioning Economy

Will the price of controlling current and future pandemics be our privacy?  Will societies, at some point, be willing to strike a Faustian Bargain and give up their privacy in return for a functioning economy?  A Faustian Bargain is described by the encyclopedia Britannica as a "pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance for some material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches."  Some countries have already made that bargain, and as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, more societies will be forced to confront this decision.  

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, privacy looks to be one of the values required in the Faustian Bargain to keep an economy functioning.  The other option is to offer up life itself - a serious topic for another time.

South Korea, widely praised for their fast and efficient COVID-19 response and control, passed legislation in 2015 after a deadly MERS outbreak that gave government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card and other data from those who test positive to an infectious diseases.  They have now added a central tracking app called Corona 100m.  This mobile app publicly informs citizens of known cases within 100 meters of their current location.  Both of these examples are the result of a 2015 Faustian Bargain South Koreans made between privacy and pandemic control.

In China they are using mobile apps connected to government servers and tracking systems to dictate whether a person should be quarantined, allowed to ride subways, visit and shop at malls, work and be present in other public spaces.  A green badge on a mobile phone means the owner is symptom free, yellow means the person has had contact with an infected person and hasn't finished the quarantine period, and a red badge means the owner is confirmed to be infected, or has a fever or other symptoms and is awaiting a diagnosis.  Privacy advocates are quick to point out these mobile apps can be used by police, government agencies and other intelligence services for other forms of automated social control as well.

Raina MacIntyre, Emerging Infectious Disease scholar at the University of New South Wales lists the three actions societies must quickly employ to control a pandemic: instantly scale testing and diagnostic capacity, isolate those found to be positive, and track all of their contacts (and test/isolate).  This is a nearly impossible job to do during a rapidly expanding pandemic if you are using paper, pencil and other manual processes.

Smartphones with their mobile networks, apps, GPS, WiFi and bluetooth radios and other powerful utilities are amazingly powerful computers that can collect and spinoff all kinds of very useful data for those fighting and managing disease.  Many countries and people, however, are still not willing to make the Faustian Bargain between privacy, pandemic and a functioning economy. Perhaps we will someday find out if the saying, "Everything is for sale if the price is right," is a true maxim.

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Kevin Benedict

Partner | Futurist | Leadership Strategies at TCS

View my profile on LinkedIn

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Digital Intelligence

***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Leadership and Mental Biases in a Pandemic

The global magazine, Foreign Policy, has compiled a list of things that kill more people than sharks - trampolines, roller coasters, vending machines and furniture/TVs:  In fact more than 26 people die every year after being crushed by furniture/TVs, and only an average of six people die each year from shark attacks.  With these numbers there should be an entire week dedicated to furniture/TV attacks on Discovery Channel.

Humans are not very good at analyzing risk.  We are all afraid of sharks, but never give our furniture a second look.  We all come with biases, prejudices, paradigms, different education levels and viewpoints that influence and filter the way we think.  This is all before we consider normalcy bias.  Here is what Wikipedia says about normalcy bias, "It is a tendency for people to believe that things will function in the future the way they normally have functioned in the past, and therefore we underestimate both the likelihood of a disaster and its possible effects."  It's reported that 70% of people display normalcy bias during disasters.  It's what makes people reach for their laptops and suitcases when they exit a plane during a serious emergency.

Paying the Piper In the Midst of a Pandemic

In the German folk tale, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the leadership of a small village made a verbal contract with a mysterious flute-playing exterminator to rid the village of rats.  Once the rats were successfully removed, the village leaders refused to pay.  They came to regret that. From this old tale came the saying, "pay the piper" which acts as a warning.  It means you better pay the true cost, or something sinister will happen.

In the Pied Piper of Hamelin tale the village lost their youngest generation, in the current COVID-19 scenario, it is our oldest generation most at risk.  The question to ask ourselves today is have we stopped paying the piper?  Have we lost our fear of existential risks.  Have we as a society come to believe we no longer must pay the cost of risk prevention?  Have we come to value short-term profits over safety and the lives of our most vulnerable?

Our lack of fear is a new thing.  Throughout history humans have been very fearful for good reasons.   Life was mostly short, exhausting, violent and full of suffering.  For example in 17th-century England life expectancy was only 35-years old.  In the early Colony of Virginia it was only 25-years old.  Out of the 270 men on five ships in Magellan's fleet, only 19 survived the voyage.  Yet today we seem to believe that we are safe, in control and there is no longer the need to pay the piper.

In March of 2020 the markets crashed.  Why? Investors never anticipated existential risks like COVID-19, although there have been 8 pandemic's in the past 70 years.  Investors never built the risk of a global pandemic into their financial models — and when the risk of COVID-19 had to be priced into their models in February and March of 2020, our global markets collapsed.

The United States' entire defense budget for 2020 is $738 billion. Yet in comparison we now find ourselves pumping a massive $2.2 trillion into the US economy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  We are now paying the piper, but on his terms.

I hope we learn from this.  I hope we decide to pay the piper in the future.  I hope in years to come we invest in finding and stopping pandemics early, creating vaccines and the means to produce them, have teams of experts trained to lead fights against pandemics, establish a reserve of life support systems to respond to outbreaks, and accumulate large stockpiles of protective equipment to enable our healthcare workers to provide the care we require.

Let's pay the piper.

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Kevin Benedict

Futurist/Founder

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

A Mid-Pandemic Interview with Supply Chain Risk Expert Joe Carson

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global supply chain has been in the headlines for weeks.  To further explore how the pandemic is impacting global supply chains and risk management strategies today and in the future I reached out to expert Joe Carson, CEO of Spend Strategies LLC, (former Chief Procurement Officer of both Micron Technologies and Lucent) for his insights.

What is the scope of the challenge procurement organizations are facing in high tech as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?

The challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic is the unprecedented scope and scale of the impact zone. Past disruptions, such as factory fires, tsunami’s, earthquakes or even past pandemics, were relatively localized. A city, country or region of the world served as the epicenter. In those cases, supply chains could stand a chance of reacting by adjusting their supply chains to other suppliers or transportation lanes. In this case however, the problem is much more severe.