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Women at Work wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. If you've had trouble buying toilet paper or cleaning supplies or even car and

computer parts over the past few months you've been keenly aware of something that consumers rarely think about,

corporate supply chains. The COVID-19 pandemic with its border and business closures

have showed us just how hard it is to keep making things and getting them into the hands of

end users in a timely fashion.

Most production is global and increasingly complex and one kink in the system, never mind

the worst health and economic crisis in a century,

can wreak havoc. Companies simply can't meet demand. We go without goods,

from nice to haves like frozen strawberries to necessities like medicine.

And the organizations lose revenue, sometimes so much that it's difficult to stay in business.

Our guest today studies supply chains and has ideas for how they can be improved

and made more resilient for future crises.

Willie she is a professor at Harvard Business School and he wrote the

HBR article Global Supply Chains in a post-pandemic world.

Willie thanks so much for being on the show.

Thank you for inviting me. So for those of us who didn't study operations in business school and don't think about these issues that often.

Could you give us just a quick explanation of how global supply chains work nowadays?

Well, Allison, these days global global supply chains, as you mentioned, are very complex.

...