The Role of Transportation in Supply Chains and Business

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So I remember I went back in the room, I called timeout, said we're not gonna meet anymore, and they're going, oh my goodness, we're sorry, we didn't do it. So we're gonna have a lecture now for an hour on what logistics is, and from that point on, every time we start a project, we start with this is what logistics is, because you're going across political boundaries, corporate functions, it's difficult. So you've got to get an understanding, a basic understanding of how these activities relate to one another. That's the purpose of logistics. One more quick story to really get the point home. This is a much older story. This goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. Any of you remember Adam and Eve? They had a lot of advantages, one of which was they could speak the same language. So their children could speak that language, and their children's children, and that went on for several generations. What happens to the spread of information when people can speak the same language? Ideas develop faster. Work is done more accurately. There's no confusion. So societies can advance very quickly when that happens. We think we're fancy with wireless this, iPhone that. They weren't doing bad either. They had urban planning, they had musical instruments, they had architecture, they had aqueducts, and they were doing pretty good. One day they were doing so well, in fact, they decided to celebrate all of their technical and artistic success. Anybody remember what they decided to do to celebrate all of that? Build a tower. In fact, they were going to build it all the way up into heaven. I was reading this story one day, and you know how you're reading something and sometimes a paragraph or a sentence just jumps off the page at you? I'm reading this, and God is watching all of this, and says if they can speak the same language, there's not anything they can't accomplish. And I thought, wait a second, let me read that again. If they can speak the same language, there's not anything they can't accomplish. I thought that'll work in a business, that'll work in a family, that'll work on a sports team, that'll work just about anywhere. I got so fired up about that, it motivated me to write the most boring book ever written called The Language of Logistics. To drive the point home one more time, there was one problem. The people kind of forgot who gave them the ability to do all these great things. So God, to help them remember, did what? What did he do? Anybody remember? Excuse me? He confounded the languages. So now the person with the drill press, drill, couldn't talk to the person with the screwdriver, couldn't talk to the person with the hammer, it says they got halfway up and the whole thing scattered. And that's what happens to a lot of these logistics projects. People get part the way done, they reach some place where they can't get over the political boundaries of the company, and the whole thing just gets dismantled. If you can get that language though, it's very powerful. And in organizations from Disney to Honda to BP to Hallmark Cards to the Schwann's Food Company, and I could keep going

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