 So let us kick start and the rest of the people who will be joining a bit later can take the participation. So welcome everybody. And it's a pleasure to do one more webinar together with our Harvard Business School alumni. This is an exclusive session with our leader, Sam Almizano, chairman of the Center for Global Enterprises and former chairman and president of IBM. And Chris Kane, president of the Center for Global Enterprises and president and CEO of Mercator 21. My name is Marco Kovachowich and I'm an OPM 52 class and I'm a founder and CEO of Signet World. And basically I'm fortunate to work together with Sam and Chris within the Digital Supply Chain Institute, housed within the New York based Center for Global Enterprises. You will hear more about the CGE from Sam and Chris and you can all find common thread that it's closely correlated with today's topic, the future of business and the role of Digital Supply Chain. Please feel free to think, share and react out because collaboration and cooperation with businesses worldwide is in the core of the both organizations. Before we start, let me share just the basic housekeeping rules. We will be recording this session today for our records and we will be sharing it with you after the event. We will begin with 25 minutes, let's say presentation and then we'll go to an open Q&A. Please ask your questions within the format of the chat and followed by your name because we will be then creating the Q&A list and we ask you kindly not to add any comments or thoughts into your questions because you will be asked to do a verbal question directly to the speakers after we create the list. Now we know that we are very limited with time so this is why we ask you to keep it short and direct so as many alums can ask the question. For the ones we will not be able to answer because of the time limit, we are committing to answer in two weeks time and send it to you along with the recording of this session. If you have any questions about the Center for Global Enterprises or Digital Supply Chain Institute, we will provide the contact details to all of you at the end and if anybody is willing to take the conversation forward and have one-on-one calls, we will be glad to create that and organize that. So now I think it's the time to start our session and to create together one-of-a-kind Harvard experience. So dear Sam, dear Chris, thank you very much for being here with us. Thank you very much for contributing to create this session and thank you for working on the future of business. So the floor is yours. I agree, thank you Marco. This is Sam, let me start and then I'll pass it to my colleague Chris. I'd like you just thought of what I do right away is just bring up what CGE is and I will not CGE is, I should say, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because we wanna get into the substance of obviously the today's session. But we, when I retired from IBM, I thought that it was important that we fundamentally create an entity that could advance learning for future leaders because we felt that there were gaps relative to what was happening, at least as we observed in the marketplace. And so Chris was kind enough to join the initiative with me and become the president which actually done most of the work here and helped us get this thing to look, I think in mature state. I just will spend a second on the board because the board is heavily involved and it makes sense when we talk about our research agenda and I'll just highlight some of the people, I won't go through everyone, but I think you know some of these folks. I mean, if I start with the, I'll start with the entrepreneurs. Jerry Yang is an old old friend from Yahoo days and then as you know, Ali Baba now zoom, zoom now is a hundred billion dollar valuation. So Jerry's doing quite fine from a technical technology investor perspective. Another gentleman, if I stay in that path is Jim Breyer was also on our board. Jim ran Excel for a long time, another Harvard graduate by the way, Stanford, Harvard. He was one of the first investors in Facebook. And as he said to me, you know, you don't need many after Facebook. And so the cost basis of his Facebook stock is a nickel US 5 cents. So he's done fine. If we go through the outcome, a little bit on the academic side, we have a gentleman by the name of Michael Spence, Nobel Prize laureate who ran the graduate school of business at Stanford. He's on our board and great economists, Kevin Warsh, he was yesterday in the Wall Street Journal but was up for the central bank in the US and the bank of England. Also a professor at Stanford works with us. International, we have some international members but I think I'd like to highlight the issue of G. Lee, the automotive company who acquired Bobo. So, and then we, you know, I have like showing Lazarus who ran Ogabee. I think it's one of the best marketing people in the world. So the point of that is that they go through necessarily those people, but they're all engaged and they work with us and they were heavily, they were providing great advice of how we should structure CGE, which gets me to the point of what I'll call the research agenda and then I'll explain the institutes but on the research agenda, we decided to take a different path versus just say CGE or Chris and I pick a topic, go work with some leading academic institution, whomever it happened to be, Harvard Business School, let's say whomever, right? And do research from the academic dimension. We felt that this should be much more pragmatic. So we went around the world and we did, we had these meetings, exchanges with CEOs. We started in China, partnered with Peking University. We did it at Stanford for the US side. We went to NCI for Europe and ITT in India and we had over a hundred CEOs tell us how they thought we should structure the research and they all gravitated to supply chains. Before I go to supply chain, there are others in CGE that might be a venture. So one is we're developing African women entrepreneurs called AWAC. That's been great. We've done about six or 700. We're about to start another cohort there. We've done a lot of work around engaged in investing in activism to the Applied Corporate Governance Institute. Many of us that ran the Obama Commission on Cyber created this institute afterwards called the Cyber Readiness Institute, which is now housed in CGE. And then lastly, we have a scholars program, a global scholars program. Chris can take you through the numbers, but it's thousands of kids around the world in various schools that are all participating in that. As we produce content, we try to make it available to these young people. What happened in the research getting me to the digital supply chain, which was the first one we did, the CEOs really came to the point that, hey, the most impactful thing that we could work on was research around the digital supply chain. And as we all know, the digital supply chain touches everything in the business from the customer, the revenue side to the cost of productivity side. It's end to end. And so, and there was a tremendous amount, this is before we got into all the issues around trade and those sorts of things of populism, but there was a tremendous amount of understanding and they saw the impact of technology was going to play in the future of these digital supply chains. So that's where we launched all of our initial research. And we did a lot of work there. What happened recently, and we'll go to the next slide, is then we run into this pandemic, right? And so that when we ran into the pandemic, our colleagues, and we've done a lot of work at CG through DSCI, but our colleagues all sat there and said, you know, we have two challenges. The first challenge we have is a business which you see the details on the chart, but fundamentally it's just, how do I recover? What does it mean to recover? You know, what's necessary? Now I'm back, I'm going to take you back to like March timeframe, you know, right? In the early stages of this thing, especially in Europe and United States, what does it take to recover? What do I need to do to make my, company safe for my employees? How about my employees? What do I do to take care of my workforce? What do I do to maintain my relationships with my suppliers and my customers? And then what I do to deal with availability issues if I have any kind of constraint because the pandemic, as far as getting key components of parts, whatever it happens to be into the companies, I mean into my supply chain to get the products or the services, what have you to the actual end user themselves. And of course, then there was the financial crisis at the liquidity side of the whole issue. And some of them were just scrambling to maintain cash flows. Now governments have done a lot along the way, both in New York and the United States, the South, some of that, but no one at that time believe that the government's was talking about a V-shaped recovery, especially in North America, but none are corporate colleagues. The guys running these businesses believe this thing was anything but more like a W of anything. It wasn't going to be bouncing all around for quite honestly, most people are saying to 2022. So the first phase of where we did a lot of work and Chris is going to get a little more detail on DSCI, but a lot of work around what does it mean to kind of stabilize? How do you keep yourself going in this tough environment, especially with industries that are being really impacted by entertainment restaurants and those sorts of things, apparel, cause people can't get in the stores and shop. Now obviously there's the other side of this where things are booming, like healthcare, Zoom, like we're using today, a hundred billion dollar evaluations I mentioned earlier on and on and on. So the first phase of all the analysis and all the research we did is around stabilized and recover. Then from there, which we learned quickly in our colleagues that worked with us in DSCI, I realized that it's more than just stabilized and recovery. It's about retool. It's really necessary that we retool the supply chains. And if we can go to the next chart, I'll go back on retooling. Basically, if you think about it, I mean the pandemic brought out all the vulnerabilities of the pinch points and their supply chains. Key components, you hear about all the time when it comes to PPE equipment or in pharmaceuticals and those sorts of things depending upon where you're positioned. You have too much risk, you're too concentrated in one geography for a source of a key component. It's true in the APIs at pharma. It's true for semiconductors and those sorts of things. And people realize that beyond just populism and trade wars and all those sorts of things, there are serious things that need to be addressed of these pinch points. At the same time, they need to look at location for resiliency, not just for cost, but now resiliency is the supply chain. And then beyond that, let's put technology on top. So if you're gonna do these things, if you're gonna analyze in your supply chain and it's called how to make it more flexible and agile, more resilient to minimize geographic concentration, you might as well also think about the same time making the investment to add the tooling to this or the technology to this to really make it both resilient, robust and positioned from a responsiveness, quickness to the market as well as cost perspective by exploiting all the various technologies. And CGE and DSE have done a ton of work around technologies, whether that's blockchain, whatever it happens to be, demand calls on AI and go on and on and on in nature, the capability, the competencies, the people, but Chris is gonna give them a detail. So fundamentally, we did a ton of work. In addition to the charts we've shown here, we've done a lot of work with governments explaining to them what it would take to re-stimulate demand in the supply chain and what you could do because we believe that after they stabilize them, two or $3 trillion packages of stabilization, but none of that is aimed at generating end demand that actually businesses need at the end of the day to get back to growing again. So we did a ton of work, ton of analysis to help governments think about what's necessary through the supply chain to stimulate end user growth and more demand. With that, I'll pass it to Chris and I know at the end we'll be taking your questions. Yeah, great, thanks, Sam. And Marco, thank you for arranging this and welcome everybody. I wanna extend what Sam was saying about why we got into the supply chain area. You know, we convene, at CGE, we do three things that are kind of an organizing principle for how we conduct ourselves. We convene, we create and we collaborate. So we convene leaders, senior leaders, CEOs and C-level executives to try to understand what they're dealing with. We create content to be responsive to those challenges that they are having a hard time with. Sam mentioned finding ideas and solutions elsewhere. And then we collaborate to make sure that those ideas and research deliverables are actually relevant and practical. What I'm showing you here is that when we launched the digital supply chain institute, we convened a number of companies around the world and these are some of the logos that you, from those companies who have come to our activities. Vivek, can you go to the next page? And you can see that it's pretty extensive and very diverse, diverse by size, diverse by sector, diverse by geography. And so when we bring pre-COVID, when we were able to bring people together face-to-face, as opposed to Zoom, we brought people together all around the world. And if you go to the next slide, Vivek, please. These are the locations in which we brought these executives, Oh, hang on a second. There we go. We convened executive, what we call digital supply chain executive leadership forums. And you can see here in the various locations in which we did it. These were really powerful opportunities to make sure that we had a clear view of what the management needs and management research, applied management research topics were that were confronting yourself, people like yourself and other leaders of functions in the supply chain business. So, but COVID arrives and we have to change our approach to our convening, creating and collaborating. And we shifted to Zoom-based collaboratories. We call them collaboratories. Some people call them webinars, but we think our collaboratories are more interactive and therefore more real time in the creation of activities. We've held a number of collaboratories on a number of subjects since March. But the core essence of what the digital supply chain institute is doing is around looking at the management competencies that are necessary for supply chain transformation and execution. And as Sam said, when in three years ago, 2015, actually five years ago now, CEOs from around the world said, no, I'm struggling with how to transform my supply chain from a physical traditional supply chain to a more digital supply chain. The rest of society, many other parts of my business are increasingly transforming to a digital reality and digital execution, but my supply chain isn't as far along as it needs to be. And so that's really what we took up the flag to go and to do into create applied management learning around. So these are the areas that we have worked on over the last four years to try to help executives deal with the transformation of supply chains and the power and the leverage of digital supply chain models and execution. We produced a vision in cooperation with these companies called the Frontside Flip. Let me just say it very simply, it is how do you take a back office activity that traditionally was a supply chain and make it customer present, make it on the front side of the marketplace decision making, the customer decision making. And this is a pretty powerful objective if a company can pull it off. And we see examples of it today, but very few companies have moved to the management kind of transformation and adjustments necessary to execute it on a regular basis. So we've looked at things about the new customers. So if you're gonna do a Frontside Flip, it's a snowboarding term, but if you're gonna do a Frontside Flip, you're gonna have to know your customer and be present with that customer. And yet the customer that companies have today has been changing. We entirely, we make decisions as customers, whether that's B2B or B2C and entirely new in different ways. And so what we have been looking at is the profiling of the new customer. And if we have a new customer, they have to have a new supply chain to meet the needs and to address the needs of that new customer. So we've looked at how do you make digital supply chains more resilient, as Sam was saying. Algorithms are a core daily working element of any supply chain and any business in today's world. But what we've heard from our supply chain leaders and participants is companies are not managing their algorithms the way they manage other assets in their business. They're very siloed, they're not horizontal management. And so we've done a fair amount of work around how do you create a management process and a management system so that you can have extended functional value coming from algorithms that may be within one portion of your business but can be used and valuable to other functions in a horizontal manner across your enterprise. The number one priority that supply chain leaders have told us over the last four years is people and their talent pool. And they acknowledge that they do not have the talent today and we're from their traditional supply chain functions that will be needed to be competitive and winning in a supply chain of the future. And so we have spent a fair amount of time looking at executive leadership and talent development. We have a course that we've developed for members and non-members that is around digital supply chain executive leadership. We have also looked at the general concept of change leadership in a digital world. And what we've been told time and time again is the way I used to do change leadership or organizational change, pre-digitalization isn't working in this new world. And so therefore how do I, once I have a vision how do I get everybody on board and how do I move the organizational on? So the re-profiling of skills and the different strategies for organizational change in leadership is another area we've been involved with. Obviously metrics can't do anything. It can make any progress unless you have metrics that are relevant for where you're trying to go and what you're trying to do. And then we've also looked at the value proposition of data. You have more data than you know what to do with. Some of it is of excellent quality. Some of it's not very good quality, but you have data that is probably unoptimized from a value standpoint and for you or maybe just isn't that important to your business. Yet for a customer or a supplier it might be exceptionally important. And so we've looked at how do you value and how do you utilize your data assets, these intangible assets that you've got the same way in which you would if you had tangible assets that were in excess. You wouldn't let them sit around and just be carried on your books. And yet what we've learned from so many companies and leaders that we've worked with is they don't view data and intangible assets the same way they view tangible assets. And so we've done a fair amount of work on how do you create a data trading framework with a supplier or a customer that will allow both parties to gain more valuable insights about their business going to market and their value proposition. And then we, as Sam said, we've looked at a number of emerging and cutting edge technologies and how do you capture value from those high impact technologies such as blockchain. We've done a lot of work with blockchain. We've been through the hype cycle and the sobriety cycle. Blockchain, it works, it's a valuable technology but it's only part of a solution. And I think companies are now starting to pinpoint where that value and where that solution can be supported by blockchain. So maybe we can go to the next slide. So these were the collaboratories that I was referring to before. Since March, you can see these are the companies down below or the companies who have spoken at those collaboratories. We've tried to make them geographically diverse, sectorally diverse, which is how are you dealing with your supply chain in this COVID environment? And we're happy to show any information from those sessions with you. Let's go to the next slide. And so before we get to the Q and A, I just want to close with something Sam alluded to based upon the work that he was describing that we've learned over the last four or five years about supply chain. CEOs often refer to their supply chain as a critical must deliver responsibility for them. But if they can't get their supply chain to be operating efficiently and in a optimized way, their job is at risk. Well, in today's world, we also see supply chains as a path to the top because of the changing nature of supply chains. And there are increasing examples of people who have led supply chains and enterprises who are now becoming and or now are CEOs. And where we stand right now is that executives are telling us my supply chain has to be resilient if it's going to be dynamic enough to propel and sustain my business. At the same time, I need help with demand accuracy. The world is so uncertain right now that the demand forecasting, demand management, demand mechanisms I've used in the past aren't working or are bad and I know they're bad and they have to change. So we have been doing a lot of work around demand accuracy at the company level. And quite honestly, our goal is to eliminate the demand forecast as a management tool and to make the ability of a company to understand demand by being customer present at real time data element and data source. So let me stop there and Marco, turn it back to you and maybe we can open up for questions. Thank you very much, Chris. And thank you Sam for sharing the insights and thoughts and everything what you have been working on. I would as well ask once more, all of you please to just type into chat. You don't need to type the whole question. You can just type your name and raise the interest so then we'll follow that order. So we can follow it in a way that it's suitable for the panelists. And now we can start because we have the first question coming from Alex Fernandez. So Vivek, please let's give Alex a floor. Hi everyone, good morning. Hi, Sam, Chris. Thanks for coming. I think you guys can hear me. Yes, we can. Perfect. My question here is how have you found organizations responsiveness to having to change their perception of how they judge their vendors from a standpoint of cost but moreover to a holistic threat perception? Can they deliver? Are they in a country of risk? How are they doing that now with COVID? Do you think it's gonna change or will it go back to a race to the bottom? Alex, I'll start and then I'll pass to the Chris because I think when you get a couple of different perspectives here, most of my colleagues that I've been retired for a while but I still stay in touch with a large number of these CEOs around the world, they all believe that there's gonna be a lot learned in the pandemic and that learning is not, they're not gonna get back to the old ways. And we can talk about lots of examples in this path of technology but I'll just stay on supply chains, for example. I mean, as you know, there was reliability and cost-driven, we all scaled supply chains, IBM had a lodging, especially we were in the PC business, we spent about, I don't know, 70 billion a year, component costs and those kinds of things. So it was sizable, needless to say, and it was globalized. But my point is that everyone now has learned that you can't have a critical pinch point, you have to have redundancy. I mean, that could be a vendor strategy, quality is every bit as important, stability of the supply chain. I'm also involved in an initiative that's being run with International Chamber of Commerce on trade financing for small companies in the supply chain. But my point of all these examples is that, people have realized that this could happen again and the focus that was strictly on, say, quality and cost is now gonna become broadened. Now, I know there's a debate in that and I've been engaged in a lot of these debates but I would say the more thoughtful people in these discussions certainly understand if, yes, look, now's the time to invest, let's be honest about it, because dependent upon where you're positioned, other than in tech, valuations are being crushed. Take tech out of it, take the top 10 tech companies out of the S&P. So therefore, if you're a public company, you have financial flexibility and you need to redesign your business models and your supply chain. And a lot of these guys just say, now's the time to do it because my stocks been crushed anyway. So let's get on with investing for the retooling the supply chain as well as I'll call it the digitalization journey. Chris, I'll pass it to you. Yeah, it's a good question, Alex. What we've seen and what we're hearing from companies we're working with is kind of two things that I would comment here. One would be visibility of their suppliers is more important than ever because we are clearly in an age of disruption. But the disruption, as Sam said, is not gonna end with a vaccine for the coronavirus. The age of disruption seems to be faster, more accelerated and more constant. And so executives are trying to understand how do I get visibility, reliable visibility for my suppliers? And because I need those suppliers to be reliable if my supply chain is gonna be resilient. Technology-driven integration ends up being a key to allowing that visibility to be evident as well as valuable. And what we experienced with blockchain is not everybody wants to be integrated so that visibility is enhanced. And if an ecosystem or if a group of companies finds common value into having visibility across the processes that link them, then it's actually easier to do that now and we'll give a comparative and a competitive advantage in an age of disruption to them versus their competitors. But let me say again, not all companies want their customer or their suppliers to have visibility into their operations. And so we've seen resistance to the value proposition of technologies like blockchain, which enhance visibility and in many cases, not always in many cases, enhance as reliable. So I would just offer those two thoughts as in response to your question. Thank you very much. That was great. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Chris and Sam. We have a question from our friend Fatai from OPM 52 who just direct message me. And he's asking, how do you create the algorithm for food supply chain? What data do I need to formulate a specific algorithm? It's a cool question. Yeah, that's a great question. I tell you, since I have never created an algorithm, I think I'm almost speechless and I lost four words, but I'll pass it to my colleagues. Anybody on the phone, anyone who's on this session, I should say zoom in. They can help us with that. That'd be great. Well, thanks, Sam, for that toss. I will say, I have a very good answer for you, which is I don't know how to do that, but we are working with companies who do that and know how to do that. For instance, the Food Marketing Institute is a partner for us and we've been working on a lot of things on that point, actually. And then we have a company who has been involved with us and is a food chain, a food supply chain company, as well as a producer. So I think we could at least connect you with some people who could have a more informed point of view, but it's not my book. Sorry. Thank you both, but it's a topic which definitely comes along the way. And as Chris shared, there are institutions with whom the Digital Supply Chain Institute is cooperating and will definitely hook you up, but I read them to move the question forward. Now, Vivek, can we please unmute Simon Khan? He has a question. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Marco, for arranging this. This is really excellent. Great to meet you all. Sam, this is a question for you, just around the current environment. And based on your tenure of leading IBM, which I believe at that point was the largest tech company in the world, what do you make of the current environment where tech, big tech, obviously the valuations increase significantly and significant values created in the stock market to the recent crash in big tech. Can you give us any color on what your thoughts are for the reasons behind that? Well, yeah, Simon, I think the thing is that I think we need to keep the, let's start with the broader than I get to the more specific of the valuations because that's the thing, it's crazy. And we can comment on that, but let me start with the broader issue. If you just look at who's doing well in these markets, but from a stock perspective, versus those that aren't, if you segment it out, I mean, the top eight or 10 in the S&P, companies are all up, say, 60 to 80%. I mean, they're driving the S&P, they represent about 24, 26% of the S&P. If you take the bottom eight or 10, they're down 80% or so, you know, right? So you have this bifurcation that's occurred. The lesson in the bifurcation quite honestly, then we'll talk about valuations. The lesson is that I think people now are realizing that companies that are farther along on this digital journey are doing better than ones that aren't. I mean, let's take for an example, e-commerce is a great example. Companies that were better positioned on the e-commerce, you know, take Amazon and Alibaba, those guys out of there, but they just take, you know, the average company involved in the e-commerce journey that was making these investments has it's faring better today as they turned us on and scaled it than the guys who were falling behind. Walmart's a good example, you know, Walmart's actually done quite, for traditional retailers done quite well, relative to the category killer Amazon, you know, in this environment because they made those kinds of investments. So my colleagues have all learned that they need to be farther along on the digital journeys. Now, backed evaluations fundamentally, I mean, you had a lot of momentum players in the marketplace and we'll see what happens as a result as things get back to normal. And by that, I mean, what do I mean by a momentum player? People, as you know, I mean, the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England and the European Banking, Central Banking, Europe, et cetera have done a lot to stimulate. Money's basically free. So therefore, and there aren't a lot of options relative where to go bonds, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of people jumped into these spaces because they saw the fangs as the winners. Well, their valuations sort of got way out of line. All these trillion dollar violations, Tesla at a 900 times earnings. I know people say it shouldn't matter, but 900 times, you know, right? At some point, you know, this stuff is going to adjust. And that's what I think you see happening here. The other thing that's happening is a macroeconomic environment that's happening. Quite honestly, all the hopes for short-term bounce back, I think, are now out of the system. I mean, there was a lot of speculation in the system about, well, there'll be a virus by the fall. Therefore, we're going to come back and then back to normal. Well, guess what? You know, things aren't going to become back to normal. Now people are saying maybe it's more like end of 2021, 2022 from a macroeconomic perspective. So I think you have all those factors to play here. But I think the lesson learned quite honestly for a lot of companies, if you're not mature in your digital journey, it's now time to accelerate. If you are mature, then obviously capitalize on it. And you see a lot of people doing that. But what's driving valuations is a huge moment in play. Now what's happening, people are shifting back to safety. What does that mean? Well, value. They're going back into more traditional value-based companies that they think, once this thing can use to modestly improve, they'll do better than they have in the past. Okay, great. Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much, Simon. We have several more questions. The first one comes from our colleague Ramesh from OPM 52 again, and he asked me to ask him for him. So he's in logistics business and they have a great company in that area. And he's asking, given we are in the midst of COVID and the challenging geopolitical scenario, do you think the supply chains will be closer to the point of consumption? This will all obviously help in making it more competitive. So what are your thoughts in that area? Yeah, I'm happy to take that. Derek, Chris, you want to take that one? So the answer is we do. We think so. And they're going to be closer to consumption using a number of different methods, right? One would be distributed in advanced manufacturing capacity and capabilities that didn't exist as prevalently a number of years ago. And the other one is around regionalizing or hedging your bets, right? So that you don't have large concentrations in one region or another so that these disruptions that we were referring to before put you at tremendous risk. So we live in a world and an economy of distributed information. What we're seeing is supply chains are going to follow that path of having a distributed footprint. And if you think about technologies like blockchain, what do they call it, distributed ledger technologies, right? So the ability to be connected but distributed, I think, is an organizing principle for supply chains based upon what we're working on with companies and what we're hearing from supply chain leaders. But Sam, any thoughts? No, I completely agree. And one of the things that Chris said that we all worked on with some of the governments was what they could do in some of these incentive packages they're creating stimulate or encourage R&D to do exactly what Chris was saying. Because fundamentally at the end of the day, well, let's start with the basic. If I am the end customer and you can be closer to me and more resilient and faster to respond to my needs, that is a plus. It's a revenue generator. It's a differentiator. So I know that pure command, like I was in a pure commodity business called PC's, and I understood when you're in a pure commodity business, it is totally scale at the end of the day. And we all globalized. We all had components coming from the same places. We all globalized. And you did other things within your supply chain to make sure you get real time to deliver within 24 hours or 48 hours. But you stacked up inventory and distribution centers. You modified things. That's how you did it. But quite honestly, if you could have used technology, which didn't really exist, but if you could have used technology, well, you could have a hub and you could quickly respond and customization. I mean, you see that in 3D printing today, not in PC's, but in components and those sorts of things, where you could quickly respond in that environment. That is a customer plus. I mean, you saw Schneider, and Chris knows we do a lot of work with Schneider and those kinds of companies and Blean Fund and other logistics companies as well. But those things are all pluses from a client revenue generation perspective. And it's a balancing act between cost and a client satisfaction or revenue generation. This is why I believe in Chris and I, and we know this in all the work we've done in the past five years, the head of supply chains and company, that role is changing dramatically today. Dramatically today. And people I think, well, I should say, I think a lot of companies that I've learned that it's more than just, I need to be the low-cost quality provider. And there's a way to differentiate yourself from a demand perspective, if you could be more responsive and relative to your competition. Yeah, the former head of Schneider Electric's supply chain is now the CEO of Schneider North America, all right? So to Sam's point, if you master, if you design, architect and transform the infrastructure that delivers value, who better than to know how to lead it and manage it and the enterprise level? And she's a very impressive executive. In fact, we'll be speaking at one of our collaboratories next week. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you the icon of this. The guy who worked for me in the IBM PC company did our supply chain to Tim Cook. I think you'd all say that he's done quite well since he left me, needless to say. But phenomenal guy, and I would argue that his knowledge and the details associated with global distribution and supply were one of the reasons why he and Steve Jobs were such a good team. Steve would be the great designer and Tim was a phenomenal operator in the executive. Thank you, Chris and Sam. Now we have Gabriel, I can unmute Kibbe back as well. So. Can you hear me guys? Yes, just click on Gabriel. All right, so one of the options I assume many companies are looking at is to integrate some of their core activities in terms of supply chain. But then when you think about it, there are two kinds of core, you know, whether it's parts, in my case, or it could be processes, right? I'm sure. Those that are more commoditized, that you have a couple of suppliers and perhaps it's not so hard for you to integrate that from a technological or even investment perspective. And then there are other core parts which are more sophisticated, more advanced and maybe you don't have the skills or the technology or the hardware to integrate that at least not so easily. So my question is, are you guys seeing some trend for companies to integrate some of these activities and parts? And if they are, what is the best way to do it? To focus on more sophisticated processes and parts that perhaps will be harder to integrate, but in the end will pay off or let's go to the, let's say, to the logo hanging fruit? Matt. Okay, let me take a cut at it. I mean, since we've tried all these things when I was working and we've developed a lot of the technology ourselves let's just say for our large complex systems or storage products versus desktop PCs and think pads for computers. But even if you go back in the early stages of the PCs we were all driving for what's called integration because the key to the integration, how you integrate? Forget the Microsoft and Intel duopoly. Well, that would be a good example who did extremely well either in the operating system or in the chip or the board, right? But the more that you could integrate those advanced technologies the more margin you could generate versus just assembling the component piece parts, right? So economically you were better off and why the duopoly, I would say, well, y'all got sued. So I said they got pretty big and maybe some argue their monopolies is because they did that extremely well, you know? They integrated functionality into the operating system so the guys who could do things around it now were part of the core operating system. The systems management of the PC or the thing that let's say mobility and same thing on the chip itself. They kept putting, because you had more geometry in the chip you could put in more space, more stuff in and in and into that particular chip. The challenge associated with that is to do those things in technology in the world I lived in requires a sophisticated skill set and a larger in the budget, you know, right? It's hard to do on a smaller set of economics or resource pools. I mean, those kinds of things. That's why you had in fragmented industries guys consolidate into the big players. I'm gonna go back to the PC example. There were lots, when Bill Gates came up with the thoughts to operating system there were tons of people who had operating systems for the PC. You know, I can do the same example in cell phones. Now there's two iOS and Android, but they were, we had 15 and IBM research, by the way. I mean, so in the early stages of all these things before they integrate and consolidate but the consolidators get the biggest scale. So my lesson learned in this is if you can, if you can integrate and you have the expertise and the capital to do so, that will always generate at least in my experience the opportunity for more economics and better margins versus the pure low end commodity guy who's always gonna have lots of competition, procurement guys are always gonna beat the crap out of you to take a nickel or a penny out and those kinds of things. So now, I mean, I get into the challenges of doing it. It's easier said than done depending upon where you're positioned. And of course, if you're observing anything from our members. Yeah, I draw a distinction Gabriel in between access to core assets and technology driven integration with core assets. And I think what we're seeing is that companies are starting to take inventory of what do they consider to be their core proprietary assets. Read that to be intangible assets as well as tangible assets. With those, I'm not outsourcing those and building skill. I'm looking at how to leverage them and multiply them but not everything is a core asset. And this is one of the things we do with the framework and the rubric of our data trading initiative which is work with companies to think about what data is core to their competitive value proposition and what data is useful but not core. And integration, technology driven integration with others seems to be acceptable and easier to do on that second category than the first category. So I would just, in response to your question I would just organize my thinking around who am I gonna give access to, to some core data but I'm not gonna necessarily allow them to integrate with it for all the vagaries and the uncertainties that are evident in today's global economy. Thank you very much. Next please, Imad, Imad, please. First, thank you for this opportunity. I heard that you were saying that we could do away with demand plans when we structure supply chains. Usually demand plan is the beginning of building the supply chain. And so I was wondering whether you could elaborate how we could do away and why we have challenges of getting access to our customers' dashboards and then stock movements. So I was wondering if I'm finding this quite challenging. So please, could you elaborate on this? Yeah, I'd be happy to and I should be more precise. What I really mean is do away with the demand forecast, right? And any forecast by definition is a guess. Demand planning is necessary for sure. We'll always be a part of a management competency and needs to be. The question is how real time is that demand plan versus the time horizon of a demand forecast and the uncertainties of the forecast. So you're absolutely right. It's very challenging. But here's what we know. Every company says their demand forecast is almost always inaccurate or useless. Yet they still do it. They go through this management exercise to do it every time. And they come to us and say, it's just not worth it. The sales guys say this, I'm the supply chain people. We plan this way. It just seems to be a hamster real experience. A lot of movement, a lot of exercise and not getting anywhere. So what we're trying to do is work with companies who are interested in having capacity to be more customer present, i.e. in line with the front side flip and understanding the new customer and the real time connectivity with a new customer and to do away with that demand forecast and allow the demand plan to be more accurate and more acute in its real time nature. We don't have the answer yet, but we are working on it. And we think given the technological capabilities that companies can deploy, it will arrive. It will arrive sometime soon, but not everybody will be able to do it to Sam's point. You're gonna have to make a decision that your business model and your business imperative warrants you and making a run at this. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Chris. Next is Jay. Jay, please. Thanks, Marco. Hi, Sam. Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for your time. And Sam have always admired you even during my IBM days and even afterwards as well. So my question is around blockchain technology. My question is what are the areas in supply chain that you see the primary adoption of blockchain technology? And given the changes that we are facing under COVID and obviously the possible changes that will be coming as part of the recovery, how do you see the companies are willing to spend that much of money given the evolving nature of blockchain technology and even in future? What do you see how the companies are ready to adopt the technology or spend money for all the work that needs to be done? Jay, first of all, thank you for your compliment. Now, pass to the Chris. He's been involved with his journey from he called it the hype cycle, but it's been a journey and we've done a lot of use cases and things. So I'll let him take the lead on the answer. But again, thank you for your kind words. At my age, I need all the kind words I can get. Thanks, Sam. So Jay, let me separate out blockchain for payment systems and blockchain for operational execution, okay? And let's talk about operational execution. We've done at the Digital Supply Chain Institute probably four or five blockchain proof of value projects with companies who are trying to ascertain is blockchain useful for me and my supply chain objective in this area? And some have been very successful and some have been useless, basically. Where blockchain in our experience has been highly useful is, as I said earlier, it's a part of a solution. It is not the solution in a supply chain initiative in itself, but it does allow, assuming you have willing partners that have real-time visibility and information immutability so that you can determine things like integrity of components, reliability of delivery times and the amount of safety stock that is being held by one of your suppliers and is it too much and they're just covering their bets? We have, there are a lot of you, so traceability, visibility into components, we've seen it in agriculture, we've seen it in manufacturing, especially in areas around sustainability, manufacturing of sustainability areas, such as recyclable products. And it's really quite fascinating. It can be a real advantage, but it does take willing partners. So therefore, in answer, I wanna answer to your question from our experiences, if I'm a company and I wanna have greater visibility into my tier one, tier two and tier three suppliers for a product, I can do that using blockchain as long as I can make sure that those tier three, tier two and tier one suppliers are on board with my request, demand, mandate, whatever you wanna call it. I said before, blockchain does give you visibility, but not everybody wants visibility. Not everybody sees it in their interest for you to have visibility into actually how I am fulfilling my terms and conditions. But it can be a powerful, both cost factor, cost saving factor, as well as a speed accelerator and compliance accelerator. Let me put it this way. It's really useful in a world where you have to be accountable for your behavior. Thank you very much, Chris. We are coming now close to the end of the hour. So what I would ask you kindly, both Sam and Chris, is just to give a closing comment to the group of international entrepreneurs and people who are leading businesses in this crisis period as your final thought and then we'll take it from there. Well, Chris, I'll start then I'll pass with the Chris. I quite honestly, I know it's everybody, we all get caught up in the moment and therefore it's very difficult to see this thing improving or changing. However, I make the argument that this creates tremendous opportunities, especially for fast moving entrepreneurs and smaller companies that could respond quickly to this. And by that I mean, you see the opportunities. I mean, take what we're doing today on Zoom relative to people and how they work or say an education using similar technologies for education. I mean, people, it's not gonna go back to the way it was. Even in the public school system, people are realizing that it can't go back to the way it was. I mean, the benefits to the old systems are great benefits to the technology, but it's going to evolve and it'll be a hybrid model. You see it in healthcare. I mean, you talk about healthcare, there are companies that are providing services to the home. Now the payers, Medicare and Medicaid in the United States are actually paying for those services. I mean, who wants to sit in a doctor's office where it's always late and see the guy for 10 minutes? If you can, on your schedule, get the same quality of services or close to the quality of service unless you have a serious critical issue. Do you really need to do that? All those things and those companies again are absolutely accelerating. You see it along the way. So my point is there's all these opportunities there's gonna be opportunities in the supply chain to transform your supply chains. And as you are participants in that space, you are gonna also see those opportunities to go ahead and do that. Now the key to that is you obviously need the capital structure and the resources. So if you can, and well, if you have a friendly banker, I mean, as you know, money's cheap and there's so much money flying around in the BC community these days, it's crazy. I mean, I happen to be involved with a lot of the stuff Jim Barr and Brian Meyer partner. So there's capital everywhere these days, but the point of it being is that if you have access to that flexibility, now is the time quite honestly, I think to invest in these obvious trends. And I would just make the point of view that the hybrid model always wins over time. And I like to use the example when a software leader gave a famous speech because of technology, they would never be a branch bank. Because of the ATM, there'd never be a branch bank. Well, guess what? There are lots of branch banks. They still do different things. We were gonna get rid of paper because of office automation, and guess what? We've automated a lot of offices and we still have a lot of papers. So it's always the hybrid model that wins over time. So look for opportunities to see where this digitalization is actually creating value through the pandemic. And I believe you'll see a lot of that through the hybrid model becomes sustainable over time. So it's like, you know, from an entrepreneurial perspective which decided that I'm no longer running a large industrial company with, you know, 400,000 people scrambling every day trying to get them back to work. I mean, this is a great time to be in those kinds of businesses. Chris? Yeah, I would just close by saying, don't focus on proof of concept activities and projects. Focus on proof of management value projects. It extends from what Sam was saying. At the Digital Supply Chain Institute and CGE generally speaking, we're really focused on management, applied management learning and knowledge sharing. And what we find in supply chain, especially is too much focus on do the toys work, right? Do the technology toys, can we prove the concept? The answer more often than not is yes, the toys work. Okay, so what? If they can't be deployed to create management value for your business, then it's really a fool's errand. And so what we have been dedicated to doing is working with companies to look at proof of management value of a project. And along the lines of what Sam was saying, using the realities and the vectors of digitalization, but being able to take the supply chain and make it a huge driver of competitive value and differentiation. So let me, I'll just end with that as my closing thoughts, but thank you very much for your time and for being willing to listen to us and ask us the great questions that you did, Marco. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you very much, Chris. Once again, I think it has been a great session. To all of you who are here, we'll revert back and share the recording and the inputs. And on the other side, we will be as well glad to share one big thing which Digital Supply Chain Institute is working on. That's our new white paper on resilience of supply chain, especially in the arena of pandemic, because as rightly Chris said, there is a supply chain as a backbone of, all of the businesses is a thing we should focus on and try to revert. So from that aspect, the Institute would be very glad to help everybody and share the work we are doing. So thank you all for participating. Once again, thank you, Sam and Chris, for a great session and a big thank to Digital Supply Chain colleagues who have been running this call smoothly with us. So thank you all and we move forward. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you guys, bye-bye.