Strategic Leadership in a Disrupted World

Supply chain and logistics is full of accepted wisdom, familiar phrases and conventional thinking. But what happens when we stop accepting them at face value? This is an ongoing series of provocative perspectives from Victor Deyglio, Founding President of the Logistics Institute, challenging some of the assumptions we’ve come to accept about our profession - and asking whether they still serve us.

THE RANT: “Strategic Planning” is an oxymoron.

Much like deafening silence or seriously funny. “Strategic” is misused as an adjective describing a plan as “big” or “long term”. Strategy is NOT a bigger plan; strategic planning is not identifying actions in a longer-term horizon.

In a W5+H world, planning involves Who, What, When, Where + How. It is driven by SOPs and managed by KPIs. Plans involve step-by-step sequences of tasks integrated as processes.

As supply chain and logistics practitioners, we manage processes from source to shelf: input [supply], throughput [inventory], output [distribution], to optimize inventory [IO] and deliver value in competitive markets. This is “inside the 4 walls” thinking.

Strategy delves into Why: why do we exist as companies? Why do we choose to enter this market, but not that market? And it moves into the messy minefield of: why should we accept anything? Why shouldn’t we question everything?  Strategies focus on purpose.

As supply chain and logistics leaders, we create value [not just deliver value] for customers driving competitive advantage in markets. Value is more than just material factors; it’s about quality [exceeding expectations], innovation [uniqueness not just functionality], service
[accessibility not support], speed [flexibility not just on time] and cost [effort not just price]. This requires “outside the 4 walls” thinking, focusing on network design [ND].

Planning is about analysis and scheduling. Strategy is about synthesis and choices.

Fixated on planning as a way of life to the neglect of strategy as a way of living, one of the greatest lies we embrace is “What gets measured gets managed.”

  • First lie: neither Peter Drucker nor Edwards Deming [TQM] said that.
  • Second lie: it is misquoted. The full quote is: “What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so”.
  • First truth: it was said by Simon Caulkin summarizing what V. F. Ridgway wrote in his 1956 essay, “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements”.
  • Dysfunctional truth: relying on quantitative performance measures distorts behaviour, motivates the wrong actions, and ultimately undermines an organization's true goals.
  • Discomforting truth: we live the lie of numerical comfort, failing to realize that not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that we measure matters.

Rigid planning supported by SOPs and KPIs creates a false sense of security and reduces dynamic strategy to a static checklist or spreadsheet exercise. Global supply chains are not just linear transaction channels. They are eco-systems driven by trans-national inter-dependencies.
They demand systems thinking, not just process management. Systems thinking is strategic.

Planning is bottom-up; strategy is top-down.