Anatomy of a Leader

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2011 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2011

Leadership is one of the most popular topics we write about in SCMR. We all seem to be fascinated by individuals who can rally a company, a sports team, a country toward a shared goal. Yet when asked just what makes a good leader, most of us struggle with a precise answer. It's kind of: "Well I know what real leadership is when I see it." Reflecting our leadership theme this issue, we're pleased to introduce a new section of the magazine called "Talent Strategies." It's written by the experts at MIT's Center for Transportation & Logistics, which has both a depth of research and hands-on experience in…

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There’s a folksy sign hanging in the coffee room not far from Mary Long’s office. The sign reads: “Good judgment comes from experience—and experience comes from poor judgment.”

Mary Long is the senior director of logistics and customer operations at Campbell Soup Company. The sign is one of her ways of telling her team they should never be afraid to try something new—and always be ready learn from their mistakes.

The bias for action implied by Long’s sign is a leadership theme that comes up time and again whenever Supply Chain Management Review interviews senior supply chain practitioners or leading academics or management consultants for its regular Profiles in Leadership column. That action orientation is just one of an array of attributes vital to leading successful supply chain operations today.

To paint as nuanced a picture as possible of what supply chain leadership looks like, we drew on the rich repository of information in our own archives—in the Profiles in Leadership columns published in our pages for several years. What we found transcends the conventional literature on leadership because it comes from the voices—and the hearts—of people who have been living it every day. Experience is a better teacher than theory. Stories and anecdotes and colorful turns of phrase are often much better than abstract frameworks at conveying important ideas.

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