I am in Dallas today attending Transplace’s 2009 Shipper Symposium.  After lunch, I’ll be on a panel with Amoud Joliff (VP of Supply Chain at Cott Corporation), Ben Cubitt (VP of Supply Chain at RockTenn Company), and Kevin McClain (VP of Supply Chain at Chicken of the Sea) where we’ll discuss “Best Practices and Approaches for Supply Chain Excellence in a Downturned Economy.”  Rick Blasgen, President and CEO of CSCMP, will be the moderator.

The session is only 45 minutes long, so I guess we’ll need to keep our comments clear and concise.  Here is the essence of what I plan to say: companies should treat the economic downturn as a catalyst for change, as an opportunity to question the status quo, eliminate waste and complexity from their supply chains, invest in the “right” technologies, and transform their business models (see “A Google Approach to Supply Chain Management” and “The Reset Economy“).  But the real stars of the panel are the practitioners, so I look forward to hearing their comments.

Shifting gears a bit, on the plane ride from Boston, I started thinking about the sorry state of the newspaper industry, and printed media in general.  The Boston Globe is on the brink of shutting down (following in the footsteps of other newspapers across the country), and just about every trade magazine that I receive these days contains a lot fewer pages than a year ago.  What’s killing the industry is not a secret: readers and advertisers are shifting away from printed publications to the Internet and social media technologies (e.g., news websites, blogs, Twitter, etc.).  I spoke to the publishers of a couple of logistics magazines recently and their online revenue from things like banner ads and webcasts now represents as much as 80 percent of their total revenue!  A similar trend has occurred in the music industry (first came Napster, then iTunes), and it’s happening in video too, albeit more slowly (e.g., YouTube, Hulu).

Then I started thinking about my own experience with disruptive technologies at Motorola and Polaroid.  When I started working at Motorola in the early 90’s, it was the king of the cell phone industry (remember the MicroTAC?).  But when the industry switched from analog to digital, the company responded too slowly, allowing Nokia and others to move past them.  The cell phone division is now an albatross for Motorola.  And when I joined Polaroid in the late 90s, many of its leaders were in complete denial of digital photography’s threat to the core film business (which was already declining).  Polaroid was eventually sold to an investment group, which further decimated the company, and now it’s in Chapter 11.

It might be time for me to re-read Clayton Christensen’s book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” where he highlights cases of “when new technologies cause great firms to fail.”  This happens when established products, like newspapers and music CDs, are displaced by newer, less expensive products, like blogs and single-song downloads, that get better over time and gain market share.

Are any of your company’s products threatened by disruptive technologies?  Is technology the only disruptive force?   How about “disruptive legislation” (cap-and-trade?), or “disruptive business models” like software-as-a-service and online retailing?  So many questions, so little time to explore them now (the conference is about to start).  But maybe the folks at Transplace will include a panel discussion at next year’s Shipper Symposium on “Best Practices and Approaches for Supply Chain Excellence in a Disrupted Economy.”