“I can't believe you do this for a living!” Working on a movie with Cliff Lynch, Shelley Long— the actress from the long-running TV sitcom Cheers—clearly didn't find the world of material goods movement quite as captivating as did Lynch, then the vice president of logistics at Quaker Oats.

Lynch's movie was destined for neither the silver screen nor the living room. He was making an industrial film that would help inspire and educate employees about the importance of disciplined distribution activities. Long's husband ran the industrial film company, and Long herself was helping Lynch with the movie's direction.

“It was a take-off on one of those really bad game shows,” says Lynch. “Our salespeople loved it. It really caught on. We ended up showing it at the Council of Logistics Management conference. It was a chance to do something fun and do something useful at the same time.” The quirky Quaker Oats movie became a big hit with logistics professionals far and wide.

The production of the comedic movie says much about Lynch's approach to supply chain leadership. Long before the movie's development and distribution (and ever since) Clifford Lynch has been emphatic about the importance of acquiring new skills and motivating the troops—ideally doing both together. “When I first started at Quaker Oats, I had a guy who took me under his wing and encouraged me to learn everything I could about the industry—not just what I was going to learn at work,” he explains. “If it worked for me, I thought it would work for others. I've always encouraged people who worked for me to soak up everything they could.”

Lynch saw real value in having his staff meet face-to-face with leading logistics educators to do just that. For a while, Michigan State University professor Don Bowersox would come every Friday to teach logistics to groups of Lynch's staff at Quaker Oats. After that, groups of 20-30— ranging from clerical staff to transportation managers—would go by rented bus to Bowersox sessions at the Michigan State campus. “That was quite an ambitious program,” Lynch recalls. “It took a bit of selling to my management.”

After running his own supply chain management advisory firm for 14 years, Cliff Lynch has just returned to being a logistics practitioner, signing on as executive vice president at CTSI, a provider of supply chain information services to which he had consulted for years. His new role involves pushing CTSI toward higher levels of quality and process excellence. He comes to CTSI with a lifetime of skills developed at Quaker Oats, at Trammell Crow, and in leadership positions with professional groups such as the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), where he is a past president.

Graduating from the University of Tennessee, Memphis native Lynch got his first job as a traffic clerk for Quaker Oats. He stayed there 29 years, rising through the supply chain ranks to where, after 16 years, he led a network of about 2,000 warehouse, transportation, and support staff as the company's head of logistics. Lynch's emphasis on training and motivation has had lasting effects: The manager who replaced him at Quaker Oats is still there after 20 years—a strong endorsement of Lynch's interest and skills in developing his own replacement over time. Other managers who reported to him there now run their own businesses in the logistics industry.

In the 1970s, Lynch and his team, like their counterparts everywhere, went through what he describes as “a wild and woolly time” as transportation costs soared and deregulation loomed.

Anticipating the shift in how shippers such as Quaker Oats would work with carriers in a deregulated world, Lynch began hiring transportation managers more for their skills in building and maintaining relationships with trucking companies than for their regulatory knowledge. “You needed a different kind of person in those roles,” he says.

In 1987, Lynch left Quaker Oats to become the president of Trammell Crow Distribution Corp., a leading warehouse management company running 45 warehouses and distribution centers for clients such as Del Monte and International Paper. In such a service-oriented business, Lynch's top challenge was to have Trammell Crow's 1,600 employees, most of whom were hourly paid, deliver first-class service to corporate clients. Retention was a constant issue, and Lynch introduced a variety of programs to engage and motivate the workforce. “We bought them uniforms—that was a really big deal,” he recalls. “We also tested a free lunch program, and our productivity went up dramatically.”

Another initiative that kept employees on task and away from the “Help Wanted” ads: a forklift rodeo. “Anything we could think of that would get people charged up,” says Lynch.

When Trammell Crow Distribution was sold to Exel in 1993, Lynch decided it was time to hang out his own shingle. His firm, C. F. Lynch & Associates, consulted for clients in the United States, China, The Philippines, Mexico, and Europe. And in the last four years, he has been teaching an undergraduate class in transportation at the University of Memphis. Lynch jokes that some students view it as their biggest challenge to see how early they can get him to finish. But he also shares stories about the young man who went from initial boredom to sticking around at the end of the class to ask Lynch if there was anything else to read on the topic. That promising individual has since been hired by a trucking company as a graduate trainee.

Lynch's teaching work at Memphis is a continuation of his lifelong outreach to up-and-comers at colleges and universities as well as to the supply-chain profession in general. “I've been preaching these ideas of collaboration and communications and respect for your colleagues for 40 years, I guess,” he says. “In the early days, we were a tight-knit community—we collaborated before we even knew what to call it.”

A past president of CSCMP (or National Council of Physical Distribution Management, as it was then known), Lynch has been a constant champion of the supply chain profession. He is a certified member of the American Society of Transportation and Logistics. He's also a member of several organization and advisory boards such as the editorial review board of the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management and the executive committee of the University of Memphis' Center for Intermodal Freight Transportation Studies. Lynch has authored several books and hundreds of articles on the subject of logistics and supply chain management. And he has long been recognized for his contributions: He is a past recipient of the CSCMP Distinguished Service Award, among many other plaudits.

If there's one term to describe Lynch, though, that word is probably “enabler.” “My style has always been to try to surround myself with good people,” he says. “Even in my consulting work I preferred to go into companies where I could be a resource and let them do what they needed to do.”

It's the kind of soft skill that Lynch believes has to be brought out in many more supply chain leaders today as the discipline of supply chain management extends outward not just to other departments but to other companies. “As much as anything, we need relationship managers. You need a different kind of manager today. Maybe you have someone who's a good operations manager, but you wouldn't turn him loose on your logistics providers. It's a bigger capabilities gap than it has been.”

To Lynch, the best supply chain leaders are the ones who can close that gap—who themselves combine strong operational skills with relationship savvy and who can look for and enable the same in their lieutenants. Just as Lynch has done all his working life.