Yeah, my name is Austin Hufford.

I'm the U.S. manufacturing reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Austin Hufford writes about factories and manufacturing,

which means a lot of what he writes about is supply chains.

What's a supply chain?

Basically, it's everything that needs to happen in a very specific sequence to turn raw

materials into a finished product.

So, for instance, that phone in your pocket, the supply chain means mining the aluminum

in it, fabricating the silicon chips, transporting all these materials around to the different

factories where they're assembled and combined. It means workers, warehouses, container ships.

It's a whole incredibly complex choreography in which any one step could go bad and derail the

entire process.

You've talked to a lot of different supply chain professionals.

What do they like?

Is there like a common personality archetype?

They're like the kind of person who is always,

it's going to sound a little bit morbid,

but like when they walk into a restaurant,

they're always looking at the exits to make sure if something goes wrong, they know where to go.

Like that's like a good supply chain person.

They're always preparing for the worst.

They're always planning for the worst, but then the worst kind of happened and it caught them off guard.

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