Dear Americans, if you are still having difficulty deciding which Grandpa to vote for (and, to be honest, you really, really, really shouldn’t be undecided at this stage), this short video by EPIC RAP BATTLES might help to put things into perspective:

If you are an American Citizen anywhere on the planet (or off of the planet, able to see this post in time, and able to cast a ballot off-world), then

1) Please Make Sure You are Registered to Vote
— And —
2) PLEASE VOTE! (And vote now if you are decided and are able to.)

The official election day may be 20 days away, but with many states offering mail-in / early voting, you may be able to vote now!

To find out when and how you can vote in your state, or as an absentee of your state, you can visit sites like
Better Know a Ballot or Get Your Booty to the Poll!

And if you haven’t registered yet, remember you can Register to Vote Online and you can confirm the answer to the question Am I Registered to Vote at Headcount.org (in partnership with Global Citizen).

There’s no excuse not to vote. Thanks to the pandemic, there’s not much else you can do anyway.

So, please, Vote and bring Hope back.

(Or, if you so choose, vote against hope. Voting is your right despite what some of your leaders might have you believe. But just remember, Sourcing Innovation, along with many other future possibilities, will not return until hope does.)

If you are an American Citizen:

1. PLEASE REGISTER TO VOTE
2. PLEASE VOTE

And hopefully step 2 helps you to:

3. PLEASE MAKE A CHANGE

SI cannot help you with your sourcing and supply chains now as long as there is an administration in charge that:

a) randomly closes borders
b) randomly levies tariffs
c) randomly angers and upsets its trading partners
d) fails to ensure adequate measures are in place to support essential workers needed for global trade
e) …

We have a situation where all of the risks and problems of low-cost country sourcing and third-world country sourcing are now home-country sourcing problems for all multi-nationals (as even EU-HQ’d multi-nationals typically rely heavily on the US) and the only advice that makes any sense is to:

* move sourcing / procurement out of the US
* move manufacturing / US out of the US except for that supporting the home US market (if you still have one)
* move distribution / fulfillment out of the US except for supporting the home US market (if you still have one)

and headquarter / CoE out of the EU or Canada that don’t do a) to d) listed above [or e) to zzz) not listed above] and then relocate actual sourcing / manufacturing  to locales with leadership that can handle

i) tough geopolitical situations
ii) tough epidemic/pandemic/natural disaster situations
iii) increased global business support through available manpower, infrastructure, and appetite
iv) tough local economic/political situations

which now means that
a) Mexico is off the table (since it welcomes Americans freely and has little pandemic control in place)
b) China is off the table for some categories (due to increasing technology bans around the world and detereorating relationships as a result of those bans and its hostage diplomacy)
c) Brazil might be off the table (due to inability to handle the pandemic, increasing unrest, and increasing violence / crime)
… and 3 of the 5 biggest countries you have depended on outside of the US for the last 3-4 decades are now high-risk too!

Which means your supply chains need to flip, and SI will be happy to walk you though how to do that once you have a stable economic landscape in which to rebuild (especially since it was telling you a decade ago to source not half a world away, but “close to home” for every locale you’re in), but with the unpredictability now at an all time high (especially with the US at risk of becoming an authoritarian government), there is no sure plan for anyone to recover.

So, again, if you are US citizen anywhere in the world, SI implores you to:

1. PLEASE REGISTER TO VOTE
2. PLEASE VOTE

so that maybe, just maybe, next year we can rebuild and do so in a way that is sustainable, equitable, balances what should have been done decades ago, and allows you to see the true power and beauty of a well designed supply chain.

However, just like a road needs to be paved over gravel and rocks and not swamp and leaves to be stable, a supply chain also needs a solid foundation as well — and right now the global environment (especially when you throw Brexit into the mix as well), is not giving it that.

So, until stability resumes, the only you thing you can count on is that you can’t count on anything and your most important Source-to-Pay and Supply Chain system is your Real-Time Risk Monitoring and Mitigation Command Center, preferably acquired from a risk-management vendor that tightly integrates with your S2C suite and supply chain suite and marries external risk indicators with organizational data and the wisdom of the network supply chain crowd to help you spot risks and necessary changes before it’s too late.

After all, thanks to the chaos created by the US over the past year, the name of the game is now reactive survival instead of strategic supply planning.

And since SI is all about strategic planning, development, and innovation to get us to the next level, until some stability returns, the best thing you can do is make sure one of your risk management command center integrations is a provider who provides you with daily insight on spotting and mitigating risks before they cause your bankruptcy.

In a few days, SI will either augment this post or create a new one with links to relevant providers you should be looking at if you aren’t already and content you should be reading.   But regular content on SI will not return until stability does.  No use planning a long term improvement project if you won’t be around to see it.

So again, if you are an American Citizen anywhere in the world:

1. PLEASE REGISTER TO VOTE
2. PLEASE VOTE

Thank you.  The modern world now depends on each and every one of you making the right choice!