Supply Chains Cope By Developing a Sense of Humour A+

You have two choices. Laugh or cry. Crying didn’t work in Covid and certainly won’t now. It’s literally the only choice for Supply Chains that want to survive.

Moreover, with so much going on, as The Prophet notes, how does one predict what supply chain and procurement show is next to drop? And will it be:

• frenetic commodity and input costs rendering sourcing strategies all but impossible to get right
• wrong demand signals resulting with you being stuck with all the wrong inventory
• supplier bankruptcies disrupting production and essential services
• a global scale terrorism event, as per The Prophet‘s 2024 Procurement Prediction Number 1
• the whiplash of DEI-led HR procurement/supply chain strategies which walked experience and expertise out the door in favour of inexperienced and uneducated minorities to fulfill an agenda

as well as (which were not mentioned by The Prophet in his list)

• massive, coordinated, labour strikes across multiple ports
• acts of war that result in massive sanctions against an entire country that effectively eliminate them from the sourcing equation entirely
• escalated global boycotts of your products simply due to state (country) affiliation that create a rampant drop in demand (when you have perishable goods and contracted deliveries in transit)
• more countries undergo rapid massive economic decline (like Venezuala, Ukraine, and South Africa, which are all in the top 30 for economic decline); e.g. Iran, a home of the Houthi rebels, is a top 40 fragile state and a large global producer of Petroleum)
• the double whammy of long-term double-canal shutdowns as we enter Panamanian dry season and an increased escalation of attacks in the Red Sea

… and about a dozen more risks of slightly less severity and probably three or four major risks we haven’t thought about yet! (Many of which, as we noted in part one, are going to hit us one by one as the black swans break flight formation and barrel roll directly at our supply chains.)

So if you huddle in the tub and cry, not only will you either permanently damage your tear-ducts or drown, but you won’t solve anything. So it’s time to develop, possibly a very dark, sense of humour, laugh when you can, and get yourself mentally ready for black-swan defense and disaster mitigation.