Whenever Doug Lambert is in Buenos Aires—which is fairly often these days—he likes to go to one particular neighborhood restaurant. It's not just the quality of the food that's attractive; it's the quality of the service. The Ohio State University (OSU) professor is impressed by the restaurant owner's passion for his work: “He's bussing tables, and he comes over to shake your hand. Everybody in the place is working up to the owner's level,” Lambert says.

Passion is one of four characteristics that Lambert believes are essential to good leadership. (Loyalty, fairness, and intelligence are the others.) “Leadership is the ability to inspire others to do extraordinary things,” he observes. “You help people understand what they're capable of doing.”

Lambert has been doing just that for more than 30 years, working with both undergraduates and experienced managers to help them see how their roles in the supply chain can create value. He is the Raymond E. Mason Chair in Transportation and Logistics at OSU's Fisher College of Business as well as the Director of The Global Supply Chain Forum, which he founded in 1992. Along with his OSU faculty colleague, Sebastián J. García-Dastugue, he has recently completed a new supply chain management education program in Buenos Aires. Later this year, he'll be in the United Kingdom leading a similar program. A few months after that, he could be in Spain, instructing managers in the finer points of supplier relationship management or order fulfillment.

It would not be inaccurate to say that Lambert is on something of a global mission to change how managers view the discipline of supply chain management. He has served as a faculty member for more than 500 executive development programs everywhere from New England to New Zealand and from Tennessee to Taiwan. He has published more than 100 articles in journals that include Harvard Business Review, Journal of Business Logistics, and the Journal of Retailing, and he is the co-founder and co-editor of the International Journal of Logistics Management. Lambert has also delivered at least 100 presentations to professional organizations worldwide. And he has consulted to an array of leading companies, such as AT&T, DuPont, General Mills, Herman Miller, Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, Quaker Oats, Ralston Purina, and Shell Oil.

Lambert's mission becomes evident early in his undergraduate supply chain management course. He asks the class what kinds of skills are needed to run a company. One student suggests finance; another mentions marketing. Soon, the class has listed most of the major functions of a modern corporation. Now what does it take to run an entire supply chain network? asks Lambert. He has made his point rhetorically and effectively: It calls for a whole suite of management skills. “You're already smarter than those professors who think supply chain is just distribution and purchasing,” he tells his class.

That remark exposes a significant frustration for the OSU professor: the widespread hijacking of the term “supply chain management.” He sees it being applied as a synonym for “logistics” perhaps in a bid to project a larger span of control or to acquire more resources or simply to put a fresh face on a familiar function. In some cases, it has become a catch-all term that its users may think sounds more important or more contemporary. “The unfortunate thing is that when people think about supply chain, they think just about operations, purchasing, and logistics—and many aren't even thinking as broadly as that,” he says.

His feelings are just as strong on the subject of a supply chain network. Lambert's work as head of The Global Supply Chain Forum has helped crystallize the concept of the supply chain as a network of companies, all geared to a point of consumption.

The implication is that supply chain operations are, to an extent, everybody's job. They are even a part of customer relationship management, because factors such as designated key accounts, or the resources allocated to customized products, all have a bearing on sourcing, production, and distribution decisions. On the supplier side, the discipline should extend back beyond tier-one suppliers, as forum member Coca-Cola now does with the suppliers of the plastic resin used in its bottles.

However, the network concept is at odds with the linear view of a supply chain, according to Lambert. He explains: “If everybody is supposed to be focused on that end point of consumption, then a chain is a bad analogy. The supply chain is more like a tree, with suppliers as the roots and customers as the branches.”

Lambert also critiques the now-popular view that competition is between supply chains, not between individual companies. “It's not technically supply chain versus supply chain,” he declares. “It's the guy who can manage the relationships best. In fact, supply chain management is all about relationship management.”

Many elements of Lambert's stance come out of his leadership of The Global Supply Chain Forum. First established by Lambert at the University of North Florida in 1992, the Forum gives leading practitioners and academics the opportunity to pursue the critical issues related to customer satisfaction and operational excellence independent of specific functional expertise. Membership consists of vice president-level representatives of 15 noncompeting companies that don't sell to each other. Members include blue chips such as 3M, Colgate-Palmolive, Hallmark Cards, Hewlett-Packard, Cargill, International Paper, and Masterfoods USA.

The Forum supports research focused on real-world applications, encourages sharing of information across industries, and makes research available through publications and seminars. As a key part of this effort, Forum faculty staff work with member companies to develop, install, and implement leading-edge practices in the companies as well as to publish results. Primary funding comes from annual contributions of $20,000 from each participating company.

“We picked the right people in those companies and picked projects that would be useful to them, and then we'd be able to use that material for executive education,” recalls Lambert. “At that time, having those members drive the agenda was unique.”

Over its 14 years, the Forum has focused on eight cross-functional processes, which range from customer relationship management to returns management. This research has yielded a treasure trove of material—enough for a book, an entire OSU curricula at both MBA and undergraduate levels, and a supply chain framework now used by other higher-education institutions. It has also generated plenty of executive-education outreach, where OSU faculty from the Forum's research team work with a company's corporate staff on issues ranging from supplier relationship management to demand management. As part of the outreach program for example, Masterfoods is implementing new partnership linkages with its tier-two suppliers.

Lambert's life work might never