 Taken as a whole, our global supply chain is one of the most extraordinary achievements of human coordination, billions of interconnected interactions between people, places, and production processes day and night around the planet. Behind even the simplest of products, there is often a massively complex supply chain. Little does the customer know that when they buy a bar of chocolate at the store, click to purchase a book at an online retailer, or even order a meal by phone. They have activated a global supply chain, activating dozens if not hundreds of business processes that must be carried out effectively to make sure that you get what you want, when and where you want it, and at a reasonable price that still allows a company to make a profit. The world's supply chains may deliver to us all the wonders and comforts of a modern life, but we are becoming increasingly aware that when we purchase a product, we are often buying into a system that creates many negative externalities. Although optimized on the individual level, our global supply network is often grossly inefficient on the macro level. A DVD player that may retail at just $20 can travel around the world four times during its production process, accumulating several tens of thousands of air miles before it even gets into the retail store. The bottle of water put on the table in the restaurant that we never even drank perhaps came from the other side of the planet. It will be thrown away with its plastic container shipped back around the world again. At times the system is mindlessly consumptive of natural resources, destroying forced ecosystems for single use paper wrapping. For some, our supply chains deliver them the endless delights of a consumer existence, while at the other end of those very same supply chains it is like an iron cage of imprisonment. From slave labor and child exploitation, to the perpetuation of systemic corruption and endemic inequalities, to financing criminals and fueling conflicts, some 40 million people are still caught in modern slavery along today's supply chains. So much of this though could be changed given transparency. Having light in such a dark and obscure world would have a powerful effect, as for most companies and consumers, if they knew what was happening, when and where and were given the option they would avoid it and without funding these nefarious activities would die out. Unfortunately, when taken as a whole, supply chains suffer from a centralized approach that has led to massive fracturing, compartmentalization, obscurity, and mounting complexity that creates inertia. The central issue is the overwhelming complexity and fracturing that renders supply chains like an iceberg. We only ever get to see the tip above water, our small part, while most remains an obscurity to all. As consumers and even producers, we now find ourselves shrouded in a foggy blanket of the complexity that we have created and are not able to see through and know little to nothing of the consequences of our actions. Suppliers often live in blind faith, while major corporations that may have thousands of tier one suppliers cannot see past this wall of complexity. Even within the financial supply chain, the flow of financial information and money is opaque and disconnected. Data silos and fragmentation create major challenges for collaboration and transparency. As a consequence, today's supply chains are black boxes. Whether it is really possible to track environmental impacts or guarantee working standards in such a world is questionable. Our approaches are piecemeal, and given such complex environmental issues can easily be pushed from one place to another. The conditions under which supply chains have evolved means that we have optimized for the parts, but has resulted in suboptimization of the whole. Now in an age of sustainability, this presents critical risks and barriers to progress. But structures that need to be addressed before any real progress can be made. Our global supply chain has now become all-encompassing, interacting with every aspect of human activity and thus it must account for those impacts to internalize the externalities. To tackle issues of sustainability, those values cannot be patched onto the side, but systematically built into these networks so that all flows of value and externalities are being accounted for. Realizing a more sustainable form of global economy is not about changing light bulbs. It is about the deep structural contradictions that have emerged out of the industrial model to development. At the heart of those structural issues is the massively complicated, fractured and hugely inefficient nature to our supply systems when taken as a whole. A quantum leap is now what is needed. New insights, new thinking, new business models, new incentives and relationships, and new technologies. In this respect, the critical structural transformation to moving towards a more sustainable model is moving from the linear, fractured and centralized paradigm of today towards the open, networked ecosystem model of tomorrow. We live in a world of hierarchical supply chains with different tiers where linear flows create silos, bottlenecks and lack of information exchange. Supply happens within silos and lines locking up resources and capabilities, creating huge redundancies when taken as a whole. Today's supply systems are held down by the gravity of a paradigm and set of dynamics that favor ownership and control within linear supply processes. Fundamental change will require shifting this underlying dynamic to one that gravitates towards openness, partnership and co-creating value. What is needed are no longer closed organizations and linear processes, but open ecosystems where anything can be accessed on demand. With the reduction in transaction cost, value is shifting from creating things to facilitating connections from linear production process to networks of dynamic exchange. The understanding of the supply chain is today shifting from thinking of it as a linear single chain to a non-linear network chain. Scholars have started to reach a consensus that the supply chain system is a complex adaptive system composed of multiple agents constantly adapting to each other's behavior. Businesses are about to go through an incredible transformation, a huge step change, a leap across the chasm to become something we have never before seen in the history of commerce. Hyper-connected business networks that look and act more like complex multicellular organisms than the single-cell organism companies that we know today. This change in thinking is underpinned and supported by the exponential rise of digital technology and connectivity. The centralized information systems of today work to lock up assets within a given supply chain. It is highly fragmented and we tend to optimize that part of the supply chain that we are in. Supply chains operate like a hall of mirrors with billions if not trillions of document copies and copies of copies duplicated between parties. The result? Overwhelming complexity, tracking, reconciling and verifying this torrent of inventory, purchases, invoices, bills of lading, shipments and receipts is hugely challenging and error-prone. New distributed forms of computing and data storage are needed to support these higher level structural changes. Enabling and incentivizing retailers and producers to open product data, track the processes and production of goods and empower customers with insights into the supply chain. Decentralized computing can provide accessible, trustworthy information about the origin, journey and impact to build trust and brand. This shared, secure and trusted decentralized data storage can reduce or eliminate fraud and errors in the supply chain. Including the illicit trade of goods, etc. The decentralized web offers the potential to redirect and reshape the architecture of today's global supply chains. With data transparency, we can start to incorporate all relevant factors to building sustainable systems. With these peer-to-peer networks, we can connect producers and consumers more directly, bypassing many layers of intermediaries to create a more equitable system. A decentralized system is also a more resilient and flexible one. What was once a linear supply chain path is transforming and collapsing onto decentralized networks, becoming an always-on, dynamic, integrated network characterized by a continuous flow of information and analytics between peers. These emerging networked organizations will be built on connectivity and data. They will be smart orchestrators. This video has been a brief overview to our paper on sustainable supply systems in an age of networks. The full paper presents an analysis of today's global supply system, looking at the key structural changes required to move towards a more sustainable model. We look at the current transformation from the closed centralized paradigm to the new business ecosystem model, from linear production processes to the circular economy. The paper illustrates how new decentralized computing technologies, such as blockchain and IoT networks, can work to provide the critical infrastructure enabling this next-generation supply network.