Stories from the front lines: Leadership accounts from the globe’s top supply chain executives

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2023 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2023

Best of the best. Best in class. The elite. Whatever terminology you use to describe the top performers in industry, they all have one thing in common: Companies try to emulate them. That is not easy, of course, but honors such as the annual Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 provide a roadmap for firms hoping to reach the upper echelon. As we do each year here at Supply Chain Management Review, our September/October issue dedicates significant real estate to the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25. Why do we do this? Because our mission is to help inform you, the supply chain practitioner, in all the best ways to make your own supply chains more efficient and…

Browse this issue archive.

Already a subscriber? Access full edition now.

Need Help?

Contact customer service

847-559-7581   More options

Not a subscriber? Start your magazine subscription.

If you type leadership into Google, the search engine returns roughly 5.5 billion results in just 0.48 seconds of time. And that is probably just a fraction of the content available on the topic. Give Google a full second, and it might find 20 billon results. If you even try to narrow the search down to a more specific topic—business leadership styles, for instance—Google is still able to locate 377 million of what it believes to be relevant records. It seems everybody knows about leadership or has an opinion on leadership. Even Amazon is able to turn up over 50,000 books on the topic of leadership on its site, so it’s not a stretch to assume that if you are looking to be a leader, there are plenty of resources available.

But there may be few places where budding executives can get the inside scoop on leadership skills and decision-making from the men and women they aspire to be. Sure, attendance at conferences can offer one-on-one connections and insights—and may represent the greatest opportunity to developing leadership skills—but “From Source to Sold: Stories of Leadership in Supply Chain,” provides a nice alternative to traveling around the country and shelling out thousands of dollars in conference fees and travel costs.

Authors Radu Palamariu and Knut Alicke have gathered a collection of 26 of the top global executives who dish on all things supply chain and leadership. Unlike many books, though, “From Source to Sold” allows these executives to tell their stories of leadership, lessons learned, and how to reach across the C-suite and business as a whole, in their own words.

Palamariu is the managing director of Asia Pacific and Europe for Alcott Global. He works with C-level and top management executives with Fortune 500 companies in the manufacturing, logistics, transportation, supply chain and e-commerce sectors. He is the host of the “Leaders in Supply Chain” podcast and has been named a Top 3 Global Supply Chain influencer on LinkedIn. His writing partner is Knut Alicke.

Alicke is a partner at McKinsey & Company and part of that firm’s global supply chain leadership team. He is a visiting professor of supply chain at the University of Cologne and is considered a global expert on the topics of operations, supply chain, and risk.

SC
MR