Preparing for Uncertainty Using Scenarios
This book presents a strategic decision-making process (i.e., scenario planning) to help managers build supply chain infrastructures that can adapt to uncertain shifts in the business environment.
The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes - from Coca Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner's Magical Soaps and Patagonia - navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability.
Stories from Nokia, Dell, UPS, Toyota, and other companies show how firms can reduce their vulnerability to high-impact disruptions, from earthquakes to strikes, from SARS to terrorism, and use them for competitive advantage. What happens when fire strikes the manufacturing plant of the sole supplier for the brake pressure valve used in every Toyota? When an earthquake in Taiwan shuts down chip manufacturers for Dell and Apple? When the U.S. Pacific ports are shut down during the Christmas rush? When terrorists strike? In The Resilient Enterprise, Yossi Sheffi shows that companies' fortunes in the face of such business shocks depend more on choices made before the disruption than they do on actions taken in the midst of it. He shows how companies can build in flexibility throughout their supply chains, based on proven design principles and the right culture--balancing security, redundancy, and short-term profits.