Embrace the hero maker’s craft to guide the quest for SC transformation

From the November 2025 edition of Supply Chain Management Review.

November 2025

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You know the names: Confucius, Yoda, Anne Sullivan, and Mr. Miyagi. Do you know what they did to earn their spot on this elite list? As you take a moment to think, let’s point you in the right direction. Each was an unconventional, but highly effective teacher who provoked self-discovery. If you’re still struggling, let’s offer a hint: They invested deeply in their protégé’s abilities and triumphs, sacrificing spotlight for legacy. Do you have an answer? Here is ours: They were hero makers.

Perhaps you’re wondering, “What exactly is a hero maker?” A hero maker is a mentor, i.e., a teacher-leader who cultivates the potential in others, empowering them to courageously and capably conquer the challenges in their own lives. Hero makers help others unlock their own potential to become more than they ever imagined possible. Now, you may ask: “As a supply chain professional, why should I care?” The answer is simple: You need to learn the hero maker’s craft to guide your quest for two goals.

1.  To cultivate a winning team. Victory in today’s chaotic, hyper-competitive marketplace demands a near heroic effort—every day. Such effort is only possible if you cultivate the hero in each of your team members.

2.  To build a learning organization. Enduring competitiveness requires constant advances, including occasional leaps forward via radical change. Such evolution emerges as you follow the hero maker’s proven transformational path.

Before we delve into hero makers and their craft, let’s briefly peruse the hero’s journey. Our goal is to show how the hero’s journey parallels your decision-making world.

The hero’s journey

What is the hero’s journey? In 1949, Joseph Campell published a book titled, “Hero with a Thousand Faces.” His storyline: Heroes emerge as they engage in prototypical transformative experiences. Campbell chronicled 17 steps; we simplify these into four stages, which you likely recognize as part of your never-ending quest to stay competitive.

1. The call to action. A challenge disrupts the protagonist’s ordinary life, inviting, even daring them to leave the familiar world to enter the unknown and embark on a risk-filled quest.

2. Growth through experience. In the strange new world, the protagonist confronts challenges, encounters enemies, and forms alliances. Experience encourages growth—in skills and self.

3. The darkest night. The protagonist confronts crisis. A life-or-death ordeal tests their limits, forcing them to face their fears. Victory promises transformation. Defeat means demise.

4. The return. Having overcome all threats, the protagonist receives a reward—i.e., a treasure of knowledge and/or wealth—and returns to their ordinary world a hero.

Did you notice the hero’s journey maps to the evolution of the human psyche—from unaware youth to authentic, enlightened leader? Perhaps this is one reason the hero’s journey resonates so strongly with us. And if Hollywood is an indicator, it remains as popular today as it was to the ancient Greeks. Instead of Heracles and Perseus, you saw Luke Skywalker, Simba, Moana, and even Barbie struggle through adversity to fulfill their destinies. And you likely cheered them each step of the way, making you a witness to the power of the hero’s journey.

Let’s return to the query: “Why should you care?” The answer is found in Figure 1. The hero’s journey is analogous to the hype and business lifecycles. Consider the parallels.

1. Strategic adoptions. The hype cycle depicts technology adoption over time, from initial hype (i.e., the call to action) to eventual mainstream adoption (the return). Most strategic initiatives—e.g., building a resilient or sustainable supply chain—follow a similar path. The shape of the curve suggests you need heroic fortitude to survive the transformative journey.

2. Business model renewal. Every business, including yours, is in a constant struggle to survive. According to McKinsey, in 1958, the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company was 61 years. Today, it is 15. Do you remember A&P, Bethlehem Steel, or Circuit City? Each was once an industry leader. Each was also defeated by its darkest night. Demise followed. Your next darkest night is never more than a few years away.

Your takeaway: In today’s chaotic marketplace, plagued by disruptive technologies, geopolitical tremors, tough new rivals, and rising customer demands, every company needs a hero maker to help it confront coming crises. Now, let’s look at what it takes to be a hero maker.

Hero makers and their craft

The hero maker is fundamental to the hero’s journey. Because you’ve seen the story (many times), you intuitively know why. But let’s be explicit. When the call to action comes, the hero-to-be either seeks to run away or rashly rushes in. Both scenarios would doom the story. Either the quest would never happen, or the protagonist would die along the way. The hero maker must thus step onto the stage early in the story. The hero maker does the following two things.

1. Changes mindsets. At the outset, heroes-to-be are flawed characters, lacking either humility or a quiet self-confidence. They are seldom self-aware or emotionally self-regulating. They may lack discipline, purpose, or resilience. And many must learn empathy. The hero maker initiates the attitude adjustment; the quest completes the transformation. 

2. Cultivates critical capabilities. Readiness requires more than just the right attitude. To emerge victorious, protagonists need the right skills and deep stamina. Both emerge as the hero maker puts the protagonist through rigorous and deliberate practice. Along the way, the hero maker shares encouragement—and perspective.

 

Now that you know what hero makers do, you may be wondering: “What are the characteristics of a hero maker?” Two traits stand out in storytelling and in the SC world.

1. They possess clout. Respect and position matter. Respect invites trust, and position brings privilege—the ability to shape culture. Because hero makers can’t dictate growth, they exert influence. They make it safe to step out of the box and try new things, but hold their protégés accountable. And they use their position to commit critical resources to the growth initiative.

2. They are authentic. Hero makers walk the talk, exemplifying personal responsibility. Others are drawn to their vision and want to join the cause. Most importantly, their lived example arouses grit—a desire and determination to never give up or give in, even when a task is hard or seems hopeless.

Finally, let’s look at the hero maker’s craft, i.e., how they prepare protégés to win against the toughest odds. You see, hero makers aren’t just change agents, they are mentors in the richest sense—elevating others’ aspirations and abilities. How do they do it? They are hands-on, experiential teachers who …

• see the potential in others, even when it’s hidden, before the individuals see it in themselves.
• cultivate space for struggle, knowing challenge, not comfort, invites growth.
• involve learners directly and deeply in the process to create learning via lived experiences.

Simply put, hero makers don’t just convey competence; they shape character and spark self-mastery. The result: The hero maker enables protégés to do things they never could before.

Your quest to employ the hero maker’s craft

Perhaps you’re thinking: “I’m intrigued. I see value in becoming a hero maker, but I’m no Gandalf.” Relax, you don’t need to be. Indeed, rather than look to Hollywood’s hero makers or history’s all-time greats, let’s model your quest on the more relatable Erin Gruwell. Ms. G, as her students called her, was a newly minted and quite naïve high school teacher at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, in the 1990s.

At first glance, and in her early days in the classroom, Ms. G doesn’t come across as a model hero maker. She had to grow into the role, just like you. But she persisted through early flops—modeling your probable path—to become a hero maker and transform her students’ lives (see Figure 2). Let’s look at how she changed mindsets and cultivated capabilities.

The hero maker’s bona fides

If you’ve seen the movie Freedom Writers, you’re familiar with Ms. G’s story. You know she started out with little respect and even less clout. Her HOD dismissed her lesson plans; her colleagues disparaged her passion; and her students dissed her abilities, asking: “Have you ever taught before?” The good news: Ms. G’s position as a teacher gave her just enough space to shape the classroom culture. Her authenticity, as it emerged, gave her just enough power to invite change. Your takeaway? Authenticity is often more potent than clout.

 

We don’t want to gloss over the challenge of cultivating change without clout. Ms. G’s first months in the classroom weren’t just awkward; they were painful. Without grit, she would have walked away—or conformed to norm, i.e., teaching that checks boxes but doesn’t touch hearts and elevate skills. Slowly at first, then quickly, Ms. G learned that to make change stick, you have to make change safe. Authenticity and grit kept her in the game as she began to learn and practice the hero maker’s craft.

Authentic significant emotional events

Ms. G, who admired her father’s civil rights activism, chose Woodrow Wilson because of its voluntary integration. She wanted to work with disadvantaged students from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her goal: Help them build the skills needed to stay in school—and succeed in life. Even so, Ms. G was shocked by the culture she found. Her students disdained learning and despised each other. She quickly grasped she was out of her depth.

Ms. G’s initial response: She doubled down on her teacher-as-colleague MO. In an early scene, she turned to the lyrics of Tupac Shakur. The activity didn’t end well. Her students viewed it as inauthentic. To them, she was a poser. One derided: “You have no idea what you’re doing up there, do you?” Another, when asked to move to the front row, first ignored, then defied her. Exasperated, she pulled a power play, moving all of the students to new seats. As the last student sat down, she asked, “How do you like the new borders?”

Re-assigning seats to break up cliques is a classic significant emotional event (SEE), i.e., an intense emotional experience that acts as a turning point, motivating a shift in attitude and behavior. This SEE, however, backfired. The sudden shift in MO—from supposed friend to power player—animated animosities. Rather than elevate student attitudes, the SEE invited them to stop coming to class. Ms. G was back at square one, still seeking her authentic self.

The turning point for Ms. G came unexpectedly. A Latino student drew a caricature of a black peer. As the drawing circulated, students snickered. Ms. G grabbed the paper, asking, “What is this?” Aghast, she compared the sketch to those used by the Nazi’s to dehumanize the Jews, a precursor to the Holocaust. One student asked: “What was the Holocaust?” Ms. G invited, “Raise your hand if you know what the Holocaust is?” One hand went up. She paused, then asked, “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been shot at.” All but one hand went up. The bell rang. Ms. G had grasped a hard reality. Her students had been right; she didn’t know them or their lived reality.  

Ms. G began to ask better questions and employ better SEEs, enabling her to find her authenticity as a hero maker (see Table 1). Consider two effective SEEs.

1. The line game. Ms. G used tape to mark the middle of the room. With students on both sides, she invited them to walk to the line each time a question applied to them. Quickly, they realized they weren’t alone. Empathy began to displace hate.

2. The Museum of Tolerance. She took her students (on her dime) to the Museum of Tolerance. They then dined with Holocaust survivors at the Marriott, where Ms. G worked a side gig. The students’ eyes began to open, letting in enough light to find hope for their own lives and to see Ms. G as a true mentor.

Crucially, because she was learning her craft—and because she couldn’t dictate respect—Ms. G earned trust through a series of incremental SEEs.

Walmart, Sam Walton’s five-and-dime that grew into the world’s largest retailer, knows a little about the power of SEEs to enable business model renewal. Consider three inflection points when Walmart sought radical business-model transformation.

1. Making the format leap. For 20-plus years, Walmart built an EDLP champion across rural America. By the mid-1980s, Walmart encountered a SEE—it had run out of room to grow. Walmart brought new markets (grocery and global) and new technologies (cross-docking and Retail Link) together to create the supercenter—a growth driver for the next 15 years.

2. Enhancing image. By the early 2000s, Walmart’s stock price flatlined amid a series of missteps. Target (aka, tar-zhay) had become Wall Street’s retail darling. CEO Lee Scott announced a bold move: Walmart would become a sustainability leader. Walmart also began a store-renovation program, removing SKUs to clear the clutter and adding high-end items like the George clothing line. By 2011, it was clear both moves had failed. Few customers bought the sustainability pitch. Many began to question Walmart’s EDLP leadership.

3. Meeting customers where they want to buy. By the mid-2010s, pundits had begun calling Walmart a bricks-and-mortar dinosaur. Amazon, the “A-to-Z store,” had changed consumer shopping habits. And Aldi, the German deep discounter, had undercut Walmart’s prices by 18%. Facing a darkest night, CEO Doug McMillon embraced Walmart’s 5,000-store network and doubled down on investment in know-how and technology to meet customers wherever they wanted to buy. Walmart would reinvent retail by becoming a tech giant.  

To summarize, in 1962, Walmart began its hero’s journey. The good news: Sam Walton was built to be an authentic hero maker, and Walmart flourished. Vitally, his culture of meeting challenges, especially of the darkest-night variety, with bold renewal gambits stuck. Naturally, Walmart has struggled at times. The hero’s journey is daunting, and leaders like Doug McMillon needed time to grow into their hero-maker roles. But renewal has become part of the Walmart way. Your takeaway: Leverage SEEs with authentic transformative initiatives.

Credibility drivers

Ms. G’s SEEs began to thaw, if slowly, her students’ hearts and unlock, if only a little, their minds. They created space for new attitudes—and new relationships. To move the class forward, academically and emotionally, she needed a credibility driver, i.e., a project that would help the students see their own potential and begin to trust the process. So she bought her students journals. The assignment: Write in them every day. Her promise: She would only read them if they gave her permission by putting them in a cabinet she would lock after class.

 

Critically, the journaling project met the students where they were, but invited them to step out of their comfort zones. Telling their own story in writing—and every day—was a big step up. Being vulnerable was too. Ms. G knew momentum was building as the stack of journals in the cabinet got deeper and deeper. Her students were beginning to open up. More importantly, they were buying into the possibilities a new culture and curriculum could provide.

Walmart has a go-to credibility driver: The pilot project. Pilot projects at Walmart serve two purposes—as a proof of concept, and if an idea works, to provide the insight needed to scale it to Walmart’s network. Consider Walmart’s quest to match Amazon’s delivery speed by using its 5,000 stores, located within 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. population, as fulfillment centers.

•  In 2019, Walmart partnered with Alert Innovation to pilot its first market fulfillment center (MFC) in Salem, New Hampshire. An MFC is a small (35,000 sq. ft.) automated warehouse attached to or built within a supercenter and filled with 1,000s of fast-selling SKUs.  

•  In October 2022, Walmart bought Alert Innovation and its Alphabot system to bring learning in-house. By 2023, Walmart operated a handful of MFCs, which had shrunk picking time to less than 12 minutes for 95% of online orders. 

•  In January 2025, Walmart sold its robotics business to Symbotic, agreeing to buy 400 of the Accelerated Pickup and Delivery centers (ADPs) the companies had co-developed, enough to scale the  MFC concept nationwide. Walmart is committed to pilot projects and other credibility drivers to grow its capabilities and shrink last-mile delivery from days to hours—or even minutes. 

Structural enablers

On day one of their sophomore year, Ms. G met her students with a “TOAST for CHANGE,” another incremental SEE. Consider Ms. G’s invitation, “We’re each gonna make a toast for change. And what that means is, from this moment on. Every voice that told you ‘You can’t’ is silenced. Every reason that tells you things will never change disappears. And the person you were before this moment, that person’s turn is over. Now it’s your turn.”

The toast was a reminder they had left a toxic learning culture behind and a recognition of their individual, personal growth. Ms. G invited them to commit to a quest for a better education—and a better life. They would do it together. A collaborative culture would enable their journey.

That first day, Ms. G also had a Borders (a company that didn’t survive its darkest night) bag for each student. Each bag contained four books they would read, including “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank, and “Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo” by Zlata Filipović. Do you see a theme? Her students weren’t a lost cause. They should be courageously hopeful. The emerging culture and elevated curriculum were purposeful structural enablers. Ms. G was raising the bar. The class would still be a safe harbor, but what happened in and outside the class would be more rigorous. 

Indeed, with growing confidence in each other, Ms. G evolved her pedagogy. She would no longer be the sage on the stage. She would be the guide on the side. The students would become peer coaches. Experiential learning, with a healthy dose of deliberate practice, would become the norm. Instead of writing a book report on the diary of Anne Frank, the students would write letters to Miep Gies, the woman who sheltered the Frank family.

This enabling culture was a natural place for a student to propose the class bring Miep Gies to “come and speak.” Ms. G told them it would be “really expensive.” Their response: “We could raise the money.” And they did. Miep Gies’s visit was an inflection point. Big initiatives like integrating their personal journals into the New York Times best-selling book The Freedom Writers Diary would become part of Ms. G’s MO. Room 203’s learning culture was changing. The trajectory of her students’ lives would soon follow.

Walmart has long been a beast at scaling its best ideas. Did you know that in 1966, Sam Walton attended an IBM school in Poughkeepsie, New York, to learn how computers could help digitize and expand his retail business? He planned to hire the brightest student to bring the new technologies to Bentonville. And Walmart has never stopped investing in structural enablers—e.g., infrastructure, relationships, and technologies (see Figure 3). The result: Walmart’s consistently renewed business models have shaped the future of retail for the past 40 years.

And when Walmart has lagged, the hero maker’s craft has helped close the gap. Consider e-commerce and omnichannel fulfillment. Walmart was slow on the uptake, perhaps because executives gave too much credence to anti-bricks-and-mortar pundits. Many of its early pilots skirted its stores. Only when McMillon put the stores at the heart of its e-commerce strategy did pilots start to pay off, proving a viable path forward. The result: In the space of a few years, investments in structural enablers delivered a winning portfolio of ways for Walmart to meet customers where they want to shop.

• A visit to a physical store, which 200 million shoppers do each week.
• Order online and pick up at the store (within a few hours).
• Order online, deliver to the front door (1-, 2-, or 3-day delivery available).
• Order online, deliver InHome (to the garage, counter, or fridge).
• Order online special delivery (express in 2 hours; late night before midnight).
• Order online, deliver by drone (in as little as 30 minutes in limited markets).
• The bottom line: Staring down Amazon and Aldi, a true darkest night, Walmart went full beast mode. By investing in structural enablers—e.g., Walmart+, Next-Gen FCs, and Scintilla, a data and insights platform—Walmart transformed its pilots into a remarkable delivery ecosystem.

 

Learning loops

Even as a new teacher, Ms. G grasped the education system had given up on her students. And they had given up on themselves. The negative inertia stifled growth. Her best hope to build momentum for student progress was to build learning loops into everything, including her classroom culture. She started slowly, and then let the flywheel effect take over.

• Step 1: Personalized purpose. As Ms. G connected learning opportunities to students’ lived experience, they developed a sense of purpose—and an increased desire to learn.
• Step 2: Reflection. Through journaling, Ms. G invited reflection, a powerful driver of consistent and continuous learning.
• Step 3: Peer coaching. As trust emerged, Ms. G invited her students to do peer reviews, holding each other accountable and encouraging each other to work to a higher standard.

Ms. G’s pedagogy invited students to connect with others and to engage in a call to action, i.e., to create a virtuous cycle of understanding and growth.  Sam Walton extended a similar invitation. Consider Rule #7 from his 10 rules for success: “Listen to everyone in your company: The people on the front lines know what’s going on; get their insights and learn from their ideas.” Success required everyone—from the newest employee to the CEO—to talk to customers to “find out what they like, what they don’t like, and what we don’t have that we should have.” Leveraging learning was everyone’s job, an invitation Walmart extended to suppliers with the launch of Retail Link in 1992. The daily practice of observing, asking, analyzing, and acting (OA3) permeated Walmart’s culture—and drove its cycle of understanding and growth.

With learning loops built into the Walmart way, McMillon faced a daunting task: Leverage digitalization to amplify the OA3 process. Access to information and AI was the opportunity. The loss of intuition, i.e., the human touch, was the threat. Walmart’s response: Launch Scintilla, an AI-enabled data platform that enables creative contributions from all members of the SC team.

Scintilla, which derives from the Latin word for “spark,” signifies the power of a single, granular piece of data to ignite innovation. Is Scintilla working? Merchants and suppliers say easy access to cross-platform data is helping them …

• Make faster, smarter data-driven decisions to optimize operational and sales strategies.
• Gain unprecedented insight into customer behavior and needs.
• Identify growth opportunities and ideate/innovate ways to leverage them.

 Scintilla is reducing costs and driving up revenues, especially as decision makers use the data to cultivate new insights. The biggest winners are finding innovative ways to collaborate more effectively with, and across, Walmart as well as to meet evolving customer needs. Scintilla enables Walmart to take hero-making to an entirely new scale and scope.

The hero maker’s influence

What do hero makers do? Ms. G enabled her students to reimagine their own lives—and how they interact with others—change their own decision processes, and rechart their futures. Many of her students went on to become first-gen university graduates. Some became successful business leaders, others became educators. Most paid it forward, blessing the rising generation of disadvantaged youth.

What about Sam Walton and Doug McMillon? They helped their SC teams transform the EDLP slogan into reality. Millions of people worldwide save money and live better every day. But the story really doesn’t end with Walmart customers. We have worked with hundreds of Walmart suppliers. They profess that Walmart lives up to its internal slogan of being tough, but fair (at least mostly). They say working with Walmart is often a daunting challenge, but one that has helped them raise their game—as well as their growth and profits. The result: New capabilities and products have come to market, reducing the cost of living for the people of the world.

Whether you are focused on your people, your organization, or even your SC team, isn’t it time to consider embarking on the quest to become a hero maker? Yes, most people aspire to be the hero. We get it. But empowering your team members, organization, or suppliers to win their darkest-night battles may be the more compelling story, and more professionally satisfying as well.

And don’t forget, in our crazy, competitive, and chaotic world, another darkest night always awaits. Embracing, then mastering the hero maker’s craft will give you, and your company, the best chance of winning successive darkest-night confrontations. The hero maker’s craft changes mindsets and cultivates capabilities. More importantly, it works. You can help your people, your company, and your SC team go where they could not, or would not, go alone. Imagine and embrace the quest. It’s time to make the world a better place. Such a legacy is worthy of acclaim, not unlike the mythic hero’s glorious return.

About the authors:

Stanley E. Fawcett, Ph.D., is a professor of global supply chain management at Logistikum Steyr, University of Applied Sciences, Upper Austria, and Chief Engagement Officer, ENGAGE2E.... He can be reached at [email protected].

Sebastian Brockhaus, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of supply chain management at the Monte Ahuja College of Business at Cleveland State University. He can be reached at [email protected].

A. Michael Knemeyer, Ph.D., is a professor of logistics at Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. He can be reached at [email protected]

Amydee M. Fawcett, Ph.D., CEO, ENGAGE2E.... She can be reached at [email protected].

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