Best Supply Chain University Programs - No Ivy

My colleague David Aquino has just published a study of the best University Supply Chain programs in the U.S. and while I really respect the rigor of the methodology I wish my school, Stanford, had made the list.  More pointedly, where are the traditional top-tier MBA programs in this analysis? 

The research was driven by AMR member companies who are looking for an upgrade in the sophistication of the new hires they get from university programs.  It was fair and complete, considering both recruiters' views and university program depth and breadth.  The top handful were Penn State, Michigan State, and Georgia Tech.  The only school whose MBA program regularly features among the top few in US News annual ranking and also made our list was MIT. 

Where is Harvard?  What about Wharton?  The funny thing is that these top name MBA's end up teaching much of what we at AMR have in mind when we talk about Supply Chain.  In fact, our official name for the service most people join is the "Value Chain Advisory Service".  The term "Value Chain" describes what we research better than "supply chain" but legacy and budgets prevent us from migrating the semantics.  Michael Porter at Harvard is probably the world's leading thinker on the topic of Value Chains and Hau Lee at Stanford may be the top academic worldwide on the general topic of supply chain.  Maybe the discipline is being covered, but in stealth mode.

My father-in-law, an ex-Morgan Stanley investment banker, always says we should change the term "supply chain" to something with more sizzle.  I'd love to but don't want to get stuck selling to an amorphous, budgetless concept when there are plenty of real VP of Supply Chain folks out there who need independent advice.  The loop will close as old-school operations research and logistics climb up a level to merge with more general business disciplines like new product development and launch or customer fulfillment.  Clearly, the Big Ten is doing its part (see also Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio State) to bring technical training into the world of business education.  Maybe the Ivy League will deign to follow by scaling up its interest level in these essential disciplines. 

Meanwhile, I'll be keeping an eye out for my friends at Stanford.

Engine of Recovery: the Third World

Last Thursday the New York Times Business Section featured a piece entitled "Developing Markets in Bloom Again" which reported stock markets in India, Brazil and China up by 64%, 41%, and 37% respectively over the past three months.  The article's premise was "the recovery of the global economy is at hand and being led by the developing world".  I couldn't agree more.

At our conference in Scottsdale ten days ago we focused on the need for business across industries to understand where and how their global supply chain strategy impacts and is impacted by the special challenges of managing intellectual property.  Clearly there is something to this idea since the event sold out despite the rotten economy and widespread travel bans.  Candidly, however, I have to admit we're no more certain of how to make money in the Content Economy now than we were before the conference.  So where's the growth engine that digs us out of the current recession?   

The conundrum goes like this:  we all know higher value work is based on intellectual value add and we all hope there will be profits in building IP empires.  Unfortunately, today's pricing and IP protection models are so weak that pure IP players like media and entertainment are getting killed.  We also wonder how the developing world can keep up if such work is education intensive and dependent on a highly evolved consumer economy infrastructure.  Meanwhile, consumer demand in the US and Europe looks unlikely to ever return to its credit drenched ways of 200X.  Sounds like a Catch 22 - can't move on to the post industrial economy because our profit engines are designed for the old days.

Perhaps the answer lies simply in serving the basic needs of the populations of India, China, Brazil and the like.  Take IP that is market ready including brands and formulas, life science patents, manufacturing technologies and so on, package and price it for low income consumers and seek growth in markets that are not saturated.  Bring back consumer demand data to reenergize the IP portfolio and include it in the next round of innovation.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

Developing world economies are recovering now because they have demand, and increasingly, the means to serve it.  Exports are not the engine they once were because we in the US can skip the new toys.  None of this is a mystery to some of the mega-brands we look up to like GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble or Caterpillar.  They see the opportunity and are preparing to tap it.  A global recovery will blossom if the infrastructure serving this massive consumer population moves up the priority list. 

With any luck, the brain intensive work of the new Content Economy will grow alongside this build out as established 20th century IP empires find new partners and customers in the developing world.  To repeat a phrase from our opening video at last week's conference "the modern fascination with media is built on manufacturing".  Let's build the foundation and start the engines running again.