Transformational Leadership

The transformation in the retail marketplace requires a leadership in both omni channel retail and the supply chain decision making process to support the new retail marketplace.  The retail marketplace requires a digital supply chain to support the velocity change in the retail marketplace.  This transition into a digital supply chain requires collaborative leadership to encourage and drive the transformation into the collaborative and flexible supply chain that can support the necessary changes.  Leadership in this digital supply chain model also require a great deal of flexibility along with patience to navigate through the internal and external change.  Transformational leadership in the supply chain process requires a long term commitment and the realization that there will be many struggles during this transformation.

Changes in the retail marketplace require leaders across the organization to collaborate to improve and in many cases redesign and replace the practices supporting the existing business.  This transformation of the retail market requires supply chain leaders an opportunity to play a major role in the transformation into a true omni channel retail market.  This requires a transformation of people, process and technology across the retail market to address the marketplace disruption that is being driven by consumer demands in an increasing velocity.  Leadership in this environment must provide vision and guidance through these changes by encouraging collaboration to deliver solutions to the business problems.  The transformational leader realizes that foundational changes must be made to support the new business model and then these leaders provide the vision and encouragement to explore the business demands and define the solutions to the business problems.

Transformation leaders realize that changes must be made, they do not know the end state but they provide the encouragement and the practices to help the organization define the challenges and the solutions to the challenges.  In the digital age the rate, volume and impact of change is too great to expect anyone to provide a solution that will survive the demands for an extended period.  The transformational leader brings imagination along with a commitment to both internal and external collaboration that will drive the business and resulting supply chain decision making to develop flexible and collaborative practices that will survive and even encourage the velocity of change in the market.

Consumers have taken control of change in the retail market through collaboration and imagination and the retail business and supply chain must incorporate these same building blocks of collaboration and imagination to change the omni channel market to meet the consumer demands.  Transformation requires imagination and courage to guide the supply chain through the changes and a key ingredient to success is increased collaboration in the supply chain.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?