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Pertti Korhonen
Born
When a fire damaged a Philips chip factory in 2000, Nokia treated the interruption as a threat requiring immediate escalation. Korhonen helped organise closer monitoring, alternative sourcing and engineering changes to keep phones moving through production. His example starts with a useful discipline: a supplier's reassuring first estimate should not replace your own assessment of what a missing component could stop.
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Mourad Tamoud
Schneider Electric's supply chain chief developed regional manufacturing hubs and duplicate production options for important products. These gave the company ways to shift work between countries during pandemic disruption. The investment sits behind the reassuring word resilience: additional sites, qualified alternatives and people able to make the transfer, rather than a dashboard that merely reports the delay.
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Tom Linton
At Flex, Linton helped develop Flex Pulse to bring supply-chain information together and direct attention towards exceptions. His emphasis was on the small share of operations going wrong, so teams could intervene while there was still time to act. Useful visibility means connecting a disrupted location to the parts, factories and decisions it affects; collecting more data alone does not do that.
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Toshiyuki Shiga
Born
Nissan's chief operating officer activated its Global Disaster Control Headquarters immediately after the March 2011 earthquake. Earlier disasters had already exposed the danger of losing a supplier, and rehearsals had clarified responsibilities. Shiga's account gives equal weight to employee safety, supplier recovery and coordinated decisions about scarce parts. The preparation mattered because individual factories could not solve a network-wide interruption by themselves.
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Akio Toyoda
Born
During Toyoda's presidency, Toyota drew lessons from the 2011 earthquake and asked suppliers to hold buffers of vulnerable semiconductors. Those stocks helped it withstand the early stages of the 2021 chip shortage. Later outbreaks in Asian supply networks still forced large production cuts. Toyota is worth studying for selective buffers and supplier knowledge, with that later disruption kept firmly in the picture.
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Elon Musk
Born
Tesla responded to the 2021 semiconductor shortage by qualifying alternative chips and rewriting the software needed to use them. Musk described an intense effort by engineering teams and suppliers as production reached new highs. The transferable idea is designing enough technical flexibility into the organisation to change components quickly. It was a team response to constrained supply, not evidence that chips had ceased to be a bottleneck.
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Wang Chuanfu
Born
BYD's founder built a company with substantial in-house battery and semiconductor capabilities. During the 2021 chip shortage, that integration gave it options unavailable to manufacturers relying more heavily on outside suppliers. Vehicle sales expanded, although material costs and order backlogs remained problems. The interesting comparison with Tesla is control of manufacturing capability versus the ability to redesign around whatever components can be obtained.
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Mary Barra
Born
GM moved towards direct semiconductor supply agreements under Barra, including a 2023 arrangement with GlobalFoundries for dedicated US production capacity. Standardising the chips used across vehicles was another part of the response. This changed the relationship with a critical supplier further down the chain. It was a commitment to future capacity, so the announcement itself should not be mistaken for an immediate end to shortages.
More about Mary Barra9
Jim Farley (businessman)
Born
Farley used Ford's 2021 shareholder meeting to explain that components were being redesigned to work with more accessible chips. He also raised buffers and direct foundry contracts as changes to consider. Ford continued to suffer production and supply difficulties, which makes this a useful case in the time required to change an established system. Recognising a dependency is only the beginning of removing it.
More about Jim Farley (businessman)10
John Kern
Kern described Cisco's investment in dual sourcing and Mexican manufacturing capacity as a way to cope with tariffs and later disruption. He explicitly acknowledged that alternatives cost money. This is a practical budgeting case: resilience requires paying for options before they are urgently needed. Cisco's subsequent shortages and inventory adjustments also show why a distributed network still needs disciplined demand and stock management.
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Che-Chia Wei
TSMC's factories recovered much of their equipment availability quickly after Taiwan's April 2024 earthquake, while Wei was chief executive. Seismic protection, emergency procedures and coordinated equipment checks supported that recovery. The company still incurred losses and production disruption. For customers depending on advanced chips, the lesson is the value of an operating recovery system, alongside the continuing concentration of manufacturing in an earthquake-prone region.
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Tim Cook
Born
Apple expanded iPhone assembly in India and other manufacturing activity in Vietnam during Cook's leadership, adding alternatives to its large Chinese production base. Pandemic shutdowns made the value of that geographical spread especially clear. Moving final assembly is only one layer of diversification, however: components, tooling and specialist suppliers can remain concentrated elsewhere. The case rewards looking beyond the country printed on the finished product.
More about Tim Cook13
Doug McMillon
Born
Walmart chartered ships, used less congested ports and ordered earlier to protect merchandise availability during the 2021 shipping squeeze. McMillon reported improving throughput as the retailer applied its scale to a very physical problem. This was more than asking existing carriers to hurry. It also illustrates a limit for smaller businesses: buying your own transport capacity requires money and volumes that many competitors do not have.
More about Doug McMillon14
Brian Cornell
Target added transport options, including a chartered vessel, to bring stock through the congested supply chains of 2021. Cornell's team then faced a different problem in 2022: too much merchandise in categories where demand had weakened. Markdowns and cancelled orders followed. Read the two episodes together for a useful distinction between securing supply and securing the right supply at the right time.
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Marc Engel
Unilever's supply chain chief described converting production lines, temporarily reducing product variety and shortening planning cycles during the first pandemic year. Weekly planning meetings became daily ones as demand shifted sharply. That response prioritised getting essential products made over preserving the usual range. Engel provides an unusually concrete example of what faster decisions require people to stop doing as well as start doing.
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Søren Skou
Born
The 2017 NotPetya attack disabled major parts of Maersk's operations during Skou's tenure as chief executive. Teams rebuilt systems and kept cargo moving through improvised arrangements; the company subsequently strengthened cybersecurity and recovery measures. This belongs here as a recovery-and-learning case, with serious initial weaknesses acknowledged. A logistics network depends on working information systems just as surely as it depends on ships and terminals.
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Vincent Clerc
As attacks disrupted Red Sea shipping in 2024, Maersk under Clerc diverted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope and sought additional capacity for the longer journeys. He was explicit about the resulting pressure on schedules, space and costs. The operational achievement was maintaining an alternative route under dangerous conditions. Customers still had to plan for slower journeys and higher costs.
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Frank Appel
When passenger flights disappeared in 2020, DHL's dedicated freighter fleet and airline partnerships became particularly valuable. Appel explained how that network kept express shipments moving while other cargo capacity contracted; the group also expanded pandemic-related logistics. The case makes a patient-investment argument: an existing operating asset can become a crucial buffer when the wider market for capacity suddenly changes.
More about Frank Appel19
Carol Tomé
Born
Taking charge of UPS in 2020, Tomé faced a surge in parcel demand and the need to reserve capacity for critical healthcare shipments. She described control-tower decisions that balanced what could enter the network with what it could reliably deliver. UPS later reported delivering a billion vaccine doses in 2021. Capacity discipline meant making difficult allocation decisions before congestion compromised the service.
More about Carol Tomé20
Wes Wheeler
Leading UPS Healthcare during the vaccine rollout, Wheeler described a system of shipment monitoring, reserved transport capacity, specialist freezers and dry-ice production. Each addressed a different way a temperature-sensitive delivery could fail. His example complements Tomé's network-wide decisions: a parcel arriving at the right address is not enough if its contents have spent too long at the wrong temperature.
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