Hau Lee could fill up most university libraries all by himself. OK, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but the Stanford University professor does indeed have an arms-length list of published articles that betray a ferocious interest in operations management—and a fixation on supply chain efficiency.

The bullwhip effect in supply chains? Lee is the chief architect of that concept. The idea of production postponement? Lee's fingerprints are all over it. Bridging the gap between customer demand and manufacturing supply? Hau Lee is a prime mover in getting supply chain practitioners to think holistically about what they do.

What sets Hau Lee apart is that he is equal parts academic and consultant – and lately, an entrepreneur too. (Had he lived in an earlier era, it's not too far-fetched to imagine him as a warrior priest.) Since 2002 he has been the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology Management at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, specializing in supply chain management, information technology, global logistics system design, inventory planning, and manufacturing strategy. He's also the founder and co-director of the school's Global Supply Chain Management Forum, an industry-academic consortium set up to advance the theory and practice of global supply chain management.

Lee has never let tradition get in his way – and supply chain managers are the better for that. His work as a consultant goes right back to his days as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Among his earliest clients: blue-chip organizations such as IBM, Campbell Soup, Columbia Pictures, and the U.S. Navy. “Because of my assignments, I didn't even go to my commencement,” recalls Lee. “A lot of academics see consulting and research as two different things. They think you should not be consulting before you get tenure. I didn't see it that way. I was convinced that consulting would only prepare me better for being a good teacher.”

To Lee, being a well-rounded academic cannot happen without hands-on experience of business activities. Although he had been creating such opportunities for himself as a consultant since the early 1980s, his big chance came with a one-year sabbatical, not long after he had received tenure at Stanford in 1989. “Most professors would go to another institution during their sabbatical to be exposed to how other institutions organize their teaching,” he says. “But I liked consulting so much that I wanted to use my sabbatical to immerse myself in industrial operations.”

He joined Hewlett-Packard as a full-time employee, working on deep-rooted supply chain challenges with fast-rising managers such as Corey Billington (now a professor at IMD in Switzerland), and helping to launch HP's strategic planning and modeling (SPaM) initiative to apply optimization techniques and scenario analyses to solve complex supply chain design problems for the company's imaging and printing group. “It was exciting! As a full-time employee, I was able to be part of team meetings and be present at many internal discussions and debates. As a consultant, you don't always get to do that,” says Lee.

The HP experience was a turning point. It helped Lee to see that a supply chain is more than just material flow or information flow—that its effective operation also depends on people and their myriad motivations. Later, back at Stanford, Lee used his new insights as a base for research into alignment of the incentives for different constituencies along the supply chain. That stream of study would lead eventually to Lee's “bullwhip” framework: the idea that information along a supply chain becomes progressively distorted because staff at each stage have their own motivations for acting as they do.

Lee brought a global outlook to his studies from the get-go. He was educated on three continents, attending grammar school in Hong Kong and then receiving his bachelor's degree in economics and statistics from the University of Hong Kong in 1974, his masters in operational research from the London School of Economics the following year, and his doctorate in operations research from Wharton in 1983. But early on, he also benefited from a scholarship to study on board ship—a freighter that traveled across the Far East and as far as East Africa, offering students like Lee abundant opportunities to learn from other cultures.

Just after graduating with his bachelor's degree, Lee worked with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, helping local manufacturers improve their competitive standing. “It helped me understand that it's not just sufficient to be good at, say, manufacturing,” he recalls. “You also have to be good at customer service, delivery and much more.”

Wharton proved to be the real springboard, however. There, Lee had as his thesis advisor Professor Morris Cohen, a mentor who taught Lee how to conduct rigorous research. “Morris was a role model for me in developing my academic career. The care and interest that he gave his doctoral students, the standard of teaching in the classroom, the pursuit of excellence in his research, and his strong interest in working with industry all made a deep impression in me,” says Lee.

It was Cohen who demonstrated the value of hands-on consulting as a means of building scientific knowledge—this at a time when consulting was viewed primarily as a means to supplement academic incomes. Cohen already consulted regularly to businesses. While Lee was still a PhD student, he joined a small consulting firm called Wharton Advisory Center, working as a research associate on interesting engagements for companies such as Campbell Soup.

It wasn't many years before Lee became a full partner in the consulting firm. By the time he moved to Stanford in 1983 as an assistant professor in the university's Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, he was consulting often for an array of top-drawer clientele—among them IBM. Over the years, Lee has found other ways to share what he is learning. He has affiliated with larger consulting organizations—there's only so much he can do solo, he says—and since 1997 has had a productive partnership with Accenture, where he runs training workshops for the consulting giant's supply chain experts.

Lee has also promulgated his ideas through the companies he has co-founded. DemandTec is perhaps the best-known—a fast-growing provider of demand management software that allows retailers and consumer products companies to define merchandising and marketing strategies based on a scientific understanding of consumer behavior. “That's the company that has opened up a new chapter in supply chain thinking—bridging the gap between the demand side and supply side,” says Lee.

Along with his several board memberships, Lee has been active in professional associations. Among the highlights: The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) has twice elected him a Fellow of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management.

Throughout, Lee has continued to write and write… and write. His article, “The Triple-A Supply Chain,” was the second place winner of the McKinsey Award for the Best Paper in 2004 in the Harvard Business Review. In 2004, his co-authored paper from 1997—“Information Distortion in a Supply Chain: The Bullwhip Effect”—was voted as one of the 10 most influential papers in the history of Management Science Journal.

So there are probably few more qualified to say where supply chain professionals stand today in relation to all that is asked of them. Lee points to two areas where there is a significant gap. “The first area is internal,” he says. “Many supply chain managers need to be better users of information. Data is being accumulated at unprecedented rates, but supply chain professionals are not very good at turning it into valuable insight.”

The second area is external: it relates to a broader need among business leaders in general to do more to master what is happening in emerging economies. “Often, supply chain managers will ask for my advice on China,” notes Lee. “The questions many of them ask are somewhat naïve: they're looking at China from a very narrow viewpoint—primarily focusing on labor cost comparisons when they should be looking at the complete cost of their global supply chains, from the costs of customs compliance to the costs of potential disruptions. I think there's a lot more that we can do to develop truly global supply chain professionals.”

It would be truthful to say that Lee has already done an outstanding job of developing an entire generation of global supply chain practitioners during his 24 years at Stanford. It will be interesting to watch where he leads the profession over the next two dozen years.