Essays & Updates
Field Notes
Essays on supply chain operating models, planning, procurement, inventory, logistics networks, and the economics of intelligent machines. Each one comes out of a book — the book is linked underneath.
The Archive
12 essays
The full text of each essay is published on Substack. The book each argument is drawn from is available here — direct from the author, DRM-free, and cheaper than the retail edition.
- Supply chain strategy
The Six Books Are One Supply Chain Map
How the six Chain Reaction books trace a single chain end to end, and why reading them as one map changes what each one is for.
- Leadership
Building A Winning Team, Six Years On
A six-year retrospective on building a supply chain team, and what survived contact with the org chart.
- Operating model
Past A Certain Size, Coordination Stops Being A Skill And Becomes A Memory Problem
Why coordination fails structurally rather than personally once an operation passes a certain scale.
- Logistics & distribution
Your Network Design Is A Customer Promise In Concrete
Network design encodes the service promise long before anyone writes an SLA — and it is expensive to unsay.
- Inventory & cost
Cost To Serve Is Where Inventory Tells The Truth
Unit cost hides cost-to-serve. Inventory is where the difference stops being an accounting argument.
- Inventory & cost
Inventory Is A Decision, Not A Material
Stock on a shelf is the residue of decisions made months earlier by people who never saw the shelf.
- Procurement & sourcing
Supplier Intelligence Starts Before The RFQ
Market knowledge has to exist before the sourcing event, or the event just formalises what you already didn't know.
- Procurement & sourcing
The Good Deal Fails When Procurement Buys A Unit Price
Unit price is not total cost, and the gap between them is where good deals quietly become bad ones.
- AGI & economics
Who Owns the Future? — Episode 06: When Communism Learned the Market
Serial episode from Who Owns the Future? — on what happened when a planned economy met a price signal.
- Demand & supply planning
Scenario Planning Is Response Discipline, Not Prediction Theatre
Scenarios are not forecasts with more branches. They are a rehearsal of response, and most planning cycles skip the rehearsal.
- Demand & supply planning
The Clean Forecast Can Be The Dangerous One
Forecast accuracy and forecast usefulness are different measures, and the tidy number is often the one nobody questions.
- Fiction
VANTA — Episode 06: Borrowed Lives
Serial episode from VANTA.
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