In eleven days we will close the polls on the first ever SCM World University 100. This ranking is meant to gauge how hiring executives feel about the supply chain management talent available from any of about 200 universities around the world which offer some combination of business, operations, logistics or engineering education.
Many have formal supply chain degree programs, but most do not. In fact, even among the best it is not uncommon to find an almost squeamish reluctance to use the term “supply chain”. Why the ambivalence?
The Ultimate Branding Faux Pas
When I graduated from business school in 1992 we didn’t really use the term “supply chain”. I took many operations courses and thought they were great. I also loaded up on strategy courses and saw the two as deeply intermingled. No class however, was more impactful on me than one called Integrated Design Manufacturing and Marketing.
This class was jointly taught by the engineering school and the business school with extensive use of the University’s machine shop. Teams of four competed in a two-term business game in which a product was designed, prototyped, sourced and run through a market simulation to impart lessons on what we now think of as the end-to-end supply chain. I was hooked.
As I first learned in this course, the most rewarding problems and greatest value can inevitably be found in the white space between business functions. Unfortunately, our natural urge to compartmentalize has left me struggling ever since to explain what I mean by “supply chain”.
For CEO’s, especially those trained at Harvard, Stanford and INSEAD, the term connotes some sort of gritty combination of trucks, boxes and purchase orders. For academics, it lacks the mathematical rigour of operations research. For inbound college students it is largely unknown or, at best misunderstood.
Consumers have little or no grasp of what it means to tug on the global supply chain when they make a purchase decision and as a result, the idea that ‘supply chain saves the world’ comes across as almost tongue-in-cheek.
McKinsey, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes all conspire to keep supply chain buried in logistics or operations and most business school deans literally cringe at the thought that they might be recognized for excellence in developing supply chain management talent. Somehow, despite decades of progress using the principles of integrated supply chain management to improve productivity, sustainability and consumer satisfaction we still elicit befuddlement or outright denial from many top business educators.
Looks like the marketing deficit runs pretty deep among our tribe.
Hope from the Next Generation
Kids care about the future. They want meaningful work and a healthy, just planet. They quickly form teams and readily embrace digital technologies. The next generation of university bound high school seniors, all born after the dawn of the internet and awareness of climate change, might finally change things for supply chain management.
We know for instance, that the term supply chain is more favourably viewed by the young than by older generations. We also know that social media, fed as it is by literally billions of cameras around the world, instantly exposes bad behaviour in the supply chain. Is it possible that however clumsy our semantics, supply chain might finally become cool? I think so.
To spark the debate and cast a much wider net we at SCM World are committed to providing a single global ranking of universities that employers believe are the best place to find these kids. The ranking is extremely simple, requiring working supply chain professionals only to name their top three universities “as a source of talent”.
We do not require that the universities offer a formal degree and we do not limit to total number of voters. Our expectation is that all geographies will be represented and that pure business schools will appear alongside engineering schools.
The debate we seek is not so much about which university is best, but about what it will take to launch the next generation of supply chain leaders. I am certain that supply chain can save the world, but only if the people running it can break the terminology logjam.
