Sitting down for lunch in a small Greek town…

Sitting down for lunch in a small Greek town, I didn’t expect to hear what I heard… and yet, it didn’t surprise me.

It was the first day of a three-day tour of the Greek mainland.

When I sat down with a couple from America, I didn’t expect them to finish my sentence:

“It’s like businesses don’t understand what supply chain is.”

Truth be told, there was a time when I didn’t understand it either.

I fell into supply chain in many ways. Even after studying it for three years and working in the field for twelve, I’d often find myself waiting for the inevitable question:

“What is supply chain?” or "What does supply chain actually do?"

Covid made that a little easier, because unless you were living under a rock, you heard and felt the supply chain disruptions.

The problem I saw was that businesses didn’t truly understand supply chain.

The people working in it, who had spent years trying to explain it, were suddenly thrown into a never-ending cycle of firefighting.

There was no time to come up for air, let alone fix root causes.

Frustration grew as long-standing issues were exposed and everyone wanted them fixed yesterday.

You would think that more awareness and focus would be a good thing… except the question quickly became,

“Why hasn’t this been fixed?” or “Well, let’s just fix it.”

If it were that simple, we’d have done it years ago.

The result? A whole lot of burnt-out supply chain professionals trying to hold it all together.

Two of them sitting in a small Greek town, eating lunch, deciding to choose a different pathway because the stress and burnout just weren’t worth it.

I travelled to the other side of the world to find that even there, the same challenges existed.

What I’ve learnt since making that choice is this:

My passion for supply chain will always be there. It still fascinates me.

What I'd love others to understand:

Supply chain isn’t just a department within the business. It is the business.

It’s the ecosystem that connects everything from raw materials to finished products, or from skills to services.

An ecosystem that needs to be understood and is constantly evolving.

Because you can throw all the sales or AI tools you like at a business, but if you don’t understand the fundamentals behind it, you’ll end up with unhappy customers and a burnt-out team trying to hold it all together.