General George Patton may fit the leadership ideal for many people, but he hasn't managed to inspire Chuck Poirier. The veteran CSC consultant knows that the model of the flag-waving, chest-thumping charismatic leader may be appropriate in certain circumstances, but he doesn't believe that model can be broadly effective in business these days.

“People are going to have to collaborate more and more. They also have to admit that better practices have often been invented that are outside their spheres of influence,” he says.

Poirier should know. He has spent much of his working life persistently getting managers —including his bosses—to see things differently and to push for solutions regardless of departmental boundaries or even company boundaries. In doing so, he has made enormous contributions to the practice of supply chain management, penning a dozen books on the topic. (Poirier generates the annual Global Survey of Supply Chain Progress that has run for five successive years in this journal.)

The partner in the consulting group of Computer Sciences Corp. comes at supply chain management with a very simple premise: that many hands make light work. “The biggest cultural inhibitor to collaboration is still the unwillingness to share information outside of your own company,” he says. “I think that people—particularly people in North America—have overdosed on John Wayne movies. They love the idea of rugged individualism.”

Such traits have no place in the five-level supply chain maturity model for which Poirier is widely recognized. “I honestly believe I introduced the concept of the extended enterprise,” he says. At levels 1 and 2 of the model, supply chain optimization efforts are mostly contained within a company's four walls. The third level opens up to collaboration between companies, with some meaningful improvements in business processes. Level 4 denotes much more integration up and down the “value chain,” and Level 5 implies what Poirier calls “full network connectivity”—extensive automation of data and processes among selected supply chain partners.

Poirier is pleased with the steady progress he has seen toward collaboration across the extended enterprise. “More than half of the companies we've polled have now crossed over to Level 3,” he says. “Level 4 is the new frontier in the ERP-to-ERP era, where companies are matching actual needs to available-to-supply and capable-to-supply. There are just one or two leaders in each industry sector that are doing this.”

So where did Poirier's collaboration instincts come from? He had no formal training in the discipline—there was none at the time. The third of three brothers, he has always shown a knack for approaching things differently—for asking the awkward “why not?” questions. As a commuting student at Carnegie Institute of Technology (later to become Carnegie Mellon University's engineering school) he realized that live-at-home students like him lacked the collective funding to put on the kinds of events and activities enjoyed by the school's on-campus student groups. So he set up and became president of a group called the CIT Commuters' Club to fund and organize their own activities.

When he left school and joined the St. Regis Paper Company, Poirier couldn't get over the resistance to change that was characteristic of much of the business world. His “let's do it differently” approach, coupled with his admiration for and adherence to the process orientation of quality gurus such as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, saw him progressing rapidly up the career ladder. He reflects: “It's the process that counts. There's always a better way to do something. I think my biggest contribution at St. Regis was getting people to do things differently so they didn't have to work so hard. I was always a student of using people more effectively — not by forcing them but by working with them.”

After more than 20 years at St. Regis, Poirier carried those principles and practices with him to Tenneco, where he was part of the executive management team at the Packaging Corporation of America (PCA) business unit. As senior vice president at PCA, Poirier's responsibilities included developing corporate-wide quality, productivity and cost improvement processes. He led manufacturing efforts across many of the company's divisions and was involved in acquisition and subsequent direct management of a $450 million business unit. In 1993, he published his first book with co-author William Houser: a treatise on collaboration titled Business Partnering for Continuous Improvement. Poirier practiced what he preached: With new responsibilities for sales and marketing, he developed a corporate-wide marketing and selling process based on the book's concepts, working with customers to introduce significant improvements to PCA's business processes and boosting sales as a result.

Poirier rocked plenty of boats along the way, but was almost always able to demonstrate results that proved his core collaboration premise. He recalls one incident where, as a senior manufacturing manager, he went to his chief executive to propose that he take some manufacturing engineers on sales calls to prospective customers. His proposal for the customers: We're not here to sell you more paper packaging products. We're here to learn how you use what we make, and hopefully that will help us to bring you new ideas that help you save money in the long term.

Poirier well remembers the initial reaction: “My management fought me. They said, 'You're not going to bring hourly people into a sales call.' But when we did it, it worked: We sold the business. I started changing the whole process of how we went to market, selling packaging services and not just product. Our salespeople didn't like the team sell at first—not until they started picking up commissions from the new business.”

A fierce opponent of the “not invented here” syndrome, Poirier has great admiration for the work of A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Procter & Gamble who continually seeks ideas from outside of the consumer products giant. And he cites Nike as one of several examples of top-notch companies that have consistently collaborated with partners—for instance, sharing forecasts and manufacturing schedules with suppliers.

When new leadership took over at Tenneco, Poirier opted to move into the consulting world. At CSC, he was able to bring his supply chain expertise to bear for the benefit of a wide range of Fortune 500 clients, particularly in the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors. And he was able to continue sharing his expertise through other channels, publishing many more books and ultimately authoring more than 100 articles and white papers.

One of Poirier's hallmarks has been the partnering diagnostic laboratory—an opportunity for companies to practice collaboration without risk and with little expenditure of time or resources. “We've done it with Intel and some of their electrical contractors, with Kraft and some of their distributors, with insurer Allstate and some of their glass installers,” he says. “Everyone brings their process maps. You don't allow the buyer and sellers to participate; they can watch. You bring in the engineers, the logistics people, the people interacting directly with customers. At the end of first day, you get 50 or so ideas that you really can't get any other way. These labs have never failed to come up with significant savings.”

In one case, a lab organized by Poirier helped significantly reduce inventories of supplies in the consumer goods sector. The lab brought together staff from a consumer goods company with those of its leading carton supplier. The customer learned that it was paying for carton inventories as soon as the cartons were printed, and the supplier was then shipping them to the customer's premises where space was at a premium. The dialog allowed the partners to identify and minimize a significant inventory bubble.

Poirier has taken his maverick thinking out to tomorrow's supply chain leaders, teaching his collaboration gospel to graduate students. And he continues to write and publish on the topic. “I'd say my biggest role in life has been to be a catalyst,” he says. Thousands of collaboration-minded managers would wholeheartedly agree with him.