Daily Inspiration: “One thing is certain: you’re going to have to hire yourself a ‘Chief Resilience Officer!’”

“One thing is certain: you’re going to have to hire yourself a ‘Chief Resilience Officer!’” – Futurist Jim Carroll

The world of cooperative commerce is breaking down, a victim of the global pandemic. And yet, that breakdown was already well underway pre-Covid a victim of rising economic trade nationalism. The events of the last year just might be the final trend to put a nail in its’ coffin.

Yesterday, in reaction to 3 disparate but related headlines, I filmed a little show to put this into perspective: “EU Vaccine Wars, the Suez Canal, and Coffee Problems – What Today’s Headlines Mean for Your World in 2025!”

The key point – global supply chains are badly broken, and it’s only likely to get worse! With that, there is a tremendous desire to move away from globalization to regionalization and localization – ‘let’s manufacture things at home.’ The problem, of course, is that companies and government have truly done little to address the fact that the skills required in today’s supply chain and manufacturing process are far more complex than they have been previously – and there is a dreadful shortage of required skills and knowledge.

But that’s not the only point. Companies have discovered through all this that they must spend more time on building resilience, reliability, redundancy, and backup into their global and local supply chain and manufacturing process. It’s something they must constantly worry about now – the pandemic did vast damage to what was in place and exposed all their weaknesses and frailties!

Worse yet, events like those seen yesterday – the EU moving forward to capriciously tear apart commercial trade agreements to restrict vaccine supply, a boat getting stuck in the Suez canal – lay bare how quickly supply chains can be dramatically impacted. Volatility is raging!

And if the global system for coffee breaks down, I’m really going to have something to get stressed about!

That’s what I covered in the studio yesterday – give it a watch.

Here’s the thing – companies were already having to deal with VUCA going forward – a massive uptick in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

That issue is accelerating, and the simple reality is that they probably need to elevate the importance of management of this reality into a new senior-level executive position – the Chief Resilience Officer.

Because volatility is the new normal!