Einkauf und schwarze Schwäne

Daniel Stengel kommentiert in seinem lesenswerten Blog zum Supply Chain Riskmanagement einen Beitrag von Harold Sirkin (BCG) im Harvard Business Review.

I found it rather confusing how to fill the gap between the companies which do not see themselves able to predict disruptive events and the consultant who recommends preparing for the unknown. I think what Sirkin implicitly means is that it is not about modeling specific scenarios (like the Japan earthquake) and assigning probabilities to them. But to think about more general ways to increase the resilience of the supply chain, which can be helpful for a large number of different scenarios.  Furthermore, the recommended measures miss the current trend for cost minimization and how to align both goals. I could well imaging another BCG consultant telling the same company to reduce supplier redundancy and operational flexibility to reduce cost. So perhaps risk mitigation is just not for all? Most importantly, this article also follows the Black Swan, since it is only written in hindsight as well. As you can see from the other publications of Sirkin on the HBR, which are mostly about supply chain innovation and change management, consultants fall for the trending topics as well. This is a problem for disruptions because they usually do not happen cumulatively but with long intervals between them. So the right time for this article would have been half a year ago or one year in the future. But everybody is wiser after the fact, and forgets soon thereafter. (Since I did not do a full review of all publications of Sirkin, this conclusion may be skewed.)