From supply chains to understanding chains
Supply chains taught global companies how to move products across borders. The next challenge may be learning how to move context across cultures.
During a month-long journey across the United States, I set out to understand how artificial intelligence is reshaping business and how innovation continues to transform industries. Yet one of the most important insights I came away with was not about a breakthrough technology. It was about a more fundamental organisational challenge.
Companies are moving faster than ever. But understanding is not necessarily keeping pace.
Look at globalisation through the lens of cost, and an interesting pattern emerges. The Industrial Revolution dramatically lowered the cost of production. Global supply chains reduced the cost of moving and coordinating goods across markets. The internet collapsed the cost of information. Together, these shifts allowed goods, capital, technology, and ideas to move across borders at unprecedented speed.
But as production, transaction, and information costs have fallen, another cost has become increasingly visible inside global organisations: the cost of coordination.
