COVID-19: The Supply Chain Management Professionals That will Save Our Economies and Livelihoods

COVID-19: Medical Professionals Will Save Lives. Supply Chain Professionals Will Save Livelihoods

The COVID-19 pandemic is surely the most complex event that modern global societies have had to deal with since perhaps WWII. But this catastrophic event is, in some ways, even worse than global warfare.

In war, you can see your enemy and study that enemy’s strategies, all for the purpose of out-flanking, outmaneuvering, and out-living your enemies. And while war is, as they say, “hell”… it is an event that utilizes substantial historical precedence in strategic and tactical planning. As every officer educated in our country’s military academies will tell you, “there is a plethora of past war-fighting lessons to learn because man has waged a plethora of wars.”

A viral pandemic, on the other hand, has substantially less historical precedence and lessons-learned to rely on when formulating strategies and tactics necessary to beat it. For Americans, this is especially true because the COVID-19 pandemic is not just somewhere else… it is also being fought on our own soil. This is unusual and unprecedented to anyone alive since 1865 when General

Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse… the last time a major war was prosecuted on American soil.

After every war, society changes in big ways. For example, at the conclusion of WWI, America’s Wall Street replaced London as the center of world finance. While over 110,000 Americans lost their lives in this terrible war, the U.S. emerged as a global superpower, setting the stage for enormous economic growth and standard-of-living improvements that were appreciated by nearly every family in America.

Every man, woman and child’s life changed after 1918, in ways they could not have imagined when this war broke out just four years earlier. Even today, we celebrate the “breath of life” resulting from blood transfusions supported by the invention of blood banks… an outgrowth of WWI. Think about this...it took ONLY four years to change society in ways that are relevant today, 102 years later.