Trade and Media Publications

Read an excerpt from Inbound Logistics January 2021 issue, which features a piece from Professor Yossi Sheffi's latest book, The New (Ab)Normal. 

During the pandemic, stay-at-home consumers switched to online buying, and the 2020 roll call of bricks-and-mortar bankruptcies reads like a “who’s who” of retailing, however, the pandemic has also unleashed a wave of unparalleled supply chain innovation. {Originally published in Supply Chain Management Review}

Large-scale disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic cause huge supply/demand imbalances due to interruptions in supply or surges in demand. In an unstable environment, companies often have to prioritize which customers they serve. Past disruptions reveal how companies on both ends of the supply chain have handled such challenges, both in terms of tactics they employed and considerations they used for their decisions.

Covid-19 has swelled the e-commerce tidal wave that was submerging traditional retailing before the virus struck. During the pandemic, stay-at-home consumers switched to online buying in droves, and the 2020 roll call of brick-and-mortar bankruptcies reads like a "Who's Who" of retailing. 

Consumers choose economic development over serious climate initiatives. Corporations don't invest in meaningful change, because consumers won't pay for it. And governments cannot lead if citizens won't follow. The battle to prevent climate change through behavior modification, regulation, or personal deprivation has already been lost. Yossi Sheffi explains why the solution is collaborative investment in developing technologies that can reverse climate change. 

The second part of the Management Business Review, which is a response to Professor Sheffi's "The Real Inconvenient Truth" article. 

The Trump administration’s aggressive stance toward China has compounded uncertainty on U.S.-China trade relations. In considering how the presidential elections may affect the flow of international trade, companies should avoid the accepted wisdom.

Governments and corporations have an opportunity to lead the transition toward sustainable consumption and production by shifting their purchasing power toward environmentally responsible supply networks. But this will require reliable information on complex global supply networks. What information and decision-support tools do governments and corporations need to galvanize this transition?

When companies cannot meet the full demands of their customers, leaders need to set clear decision criteria and the mechanisms to back them up.

As we struggle to come to terms with the scale of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most frustrating sights is witnessing front-line health-care workers begging for more masks, protective gowns, testing kits, ventilators and intensive-care beds...The woeful performance of these health-care supply chains raises the question of how such glaring shortages happened. And just as important: How do we ensure that this doesn’t happen again?