I’m on an airplane to Kansas City to break one of my New Year’s resolutions. I decided late last year that I was going “PowerPoint free” in 2009. After ten years of putting presentations together, I’m simply burnt out. If I can’t keep an audience engaged without Microsoft’s help, then I should hang up my lavaliere mike and go home. But here I am, with a 15 MB PowerPoint file saved on my hard drive, 34 slides too many.
This is my first trip of 2009 and I can’t think of a better place to be in early January than Kansas City, where the “Technology Night” event organized by the Kansas City CSCMP Roundtable begins at 4:00. I had no idea “night” begins so early in this part of the country. But now I know why the last flight back to Boston tomorrow leaves at 6:15 AM.
The title of my talk is “Technologies That Tomorrow’s Industry Leaders Are Investing In Today,” which immediately raises the following question: what are the attributes that will define the leading companies of the future? I came up with six attributes, which is by no means a complete list, but more than enough for a 1 hour speech.
Tomorrow’s industry leaders will…
- …manage data quality effectively.
- …make smarter business decisions faster.
- …compete not only on cost, service, and quality, but also “greenness.”
- …maximize the productivity of available labor.
- …effectively track and manage mobile assets and resources.
- …streamline and automate global trade processes and compliance.
I plan to write a more detailed report on this topic later this year for ARC clients, but if you’ve been reading my blog over the past year, you already know why I’ve selected these six “leadership” attributes. Poor data quality, for example, was my “soapbox issue” in 2007. It remains the Achilles’ heel of supply chain management, the root cause of most IT implementation failures. And it’s a problem that will only get worse, thanks to continued outsourcing, globalization, product proliferation, etc. I’ve also written a lot about “green” supply chain management, the labor-related challenges facing the logistics industry, and global trade regulations such as “10 + 2″.
So, what do you think of this list? What other attributes would you include? Which ones do you think are the most important? Let me know. Tomorrow I will write about some of the technologies that companies should invest in today to become tomorrow’s industry leaders. But now I need to get back to my PowerPoint deck, play around with “slide sorter” yet again, and see if I have the heart to delete a word, a bullet item, or maybe even an entire slide!
