ALKHOBAR: The dean of one of America's leading business schools told a group of Saudi supply-chain professionals and academicians that leadership and problem solving are the keys to success in an ever-more competitive environment.
"We teach efficiencies; we teach technology innovations, recycling and global linkages in the supply chain, but we also need to teach future leaders to confront and question the rules that guide their perspectives," said James B. Thomas, dean of the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University.
Thomas made the remarks at the 2009 Supply Chain Symposium organized by the Arabian Supply Chain Society under the sponsorship of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals and Saudi Aramco.
The three-day symposium at the Gulf Meridien Hotel in Alkhobar consists of a series of workshops and cafes led by KFUPM and Penn State instructors focused on current challenges and future opportunities in the supplies field. Thomas said the Smeal College of Business likely was the largest business school in the United States and also the global leader in teaching supply-chain management.
"Reflecting on the supply chain from that perch, I see the problems and opportunities more complex than ever imagined and the solutions equally as profound," Thomas said. "Far from being a function or a process, as we've grown up to think about supply chains in many ways, it has evolved into being the very platform for competitive distinction and advantage for many, many organizations and in many sectors. The challenge of that distinction brings some new uncertainties and supercharged challenges around decision making, around leadership and most importantly, around integration."
He noted that no one doing business today is likely to be able to use experience as a guide under the current economic conditions.
"The nature of these challenges and the remarkable opportunities that flow from them manifest themselves in many different ways," Thomas said. "Leaders of supply chains as such must be able to anticipate, recognize and be able to manage these conditions across multiple levels and across multiple organizations. That is quite a challenge, and it is often at odds with our intuition and our experience."
Problem solving is an area in which many businesses and business leaders are prone to make mistakes. He gave an example of a company responding to employee complaints that the building elevators were too slow. The manager contacted an engineering firm, which proposed an expensive solution to make the elevators run faster, but another executive noted that the real problem was that the employees got bored waiting for the elevator, which meant a far less expensive solution of making the elevator lobbies more engaging through decoration and use of artwork better addressed employee concerns. "If we are solving the wrong problems, we don't get points for that," Thomas said. "Speaking as an educator, I sometimes think that instead of assigning problems 1-10 for homework, I think we should give them 10 solutions and have them figure out what the problems are. Everybody has solutions. The key, the art, the craft of supply chains is becoming more and more figuring out what the natures of the problems are."
Thomas said that proper management structures and approaches to solving problems were vital to a company's competitiveness.
"Structures that allow for information and interaction in the long run do a lot of good for problem success. Over years of examining top management teams, teams that are designed with a single decision maker will do worse over time than those teams that invite participation," Thomas said. "It's interesting to view this in short bursts of time in business simulations with top executives. The team that is dominated by only one decision maker will either win or lose horribly. Over time, they become wholly average or near the bottom performers. This is really a governance issue, and it gets into the context of the decisions that we make and how we make those decisions. Often I see the fights in these teams not over the merits of the case or the issue but over the political fight for decision ownership. Winners of the fight may not have the best solution or even problem formulation, but they have the biggest political stick. We need to teach our students what that means and how to avoid that and how to council the folks who work with them and for them to make sure that doesn't happen."
Thomas said that having the proper perspective would enable businesses to capitalize on opportunities that otherwise might be overlooked.
"We know the following through extensive research: Managers in organizations whose general strategy is to develop defensive positions tend to see markets and competitors as threats. They will tend to see situations as negative and always as uncontrollable," he said. "The thing that's really interesting, however, is that managers in firms that could be described as prospectors -- looking out for new markets, engaging in new ways of thinking -- see the exact same situation, either as an opportunity or something that's positive and something that they can control."
By Stephen L. Brundage
© Arab News 2009
