Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

From what I've seen Petersen has taken a vast reserve of capitalist wealth and leveraged it by investing into his people to progress toward his objective of a more streamlined freight experience.

He seems to be participating seriously in a continuous improvement of his own expertise on this focused objective like no one else with those kind of resources at any recent time.

His proposed temporary container yards have got to be very urgent.

The inherent real estate problem has always loomed large. The "Just-In-Time" supply chain approach has factored out all but the minimal inventory buffers as it proliferated over the decades.

Now JIT can not be executed and there is little alternative remaining.

The storage & warehousing acreage & square footage were agressively downscaled over the long term and the increasing dependence on a fully enabled pipeline moving at maximum flow has been an ever-growing consequence.

Expediting cargo is a task that can not be fully accomplished within a single lifetime, so you really need to start early and never quit if you want to make worthwhile progress.

I think Petersen's gotten better every year and has unique abilities to offer in this crisis.

He would probably make a good supply chain tsar about now.

And he's making himself available, people should jump on it and give him a try.

Each day of delay is another day longer before a stagnant economy can begin to recover.

Coming from a marine cargo entrepreneur after 40 years of much-needed continuous improvement indeed.

- Deny there's a problem. This is distressingly popular.

- Identify the wrong type of problem. Again, quite common.

- Identify the wrong cause of the problem. Where the causal chain is complex, or there are multiple candidates, and/or direct observation or measurement are difficult (geology, infectious disease until the 20th century, mental health, software, networking equipment), again this is quite easy. Where expertise is limited, one specific failure mode I've identified is moralising deviancy, failure, or pathology. Medicine ran through this for nearly 2,000 years. Mental health is still somewhat there (especially in nonclinical institutional responses, but also among the general public, and to a certain extent even clinicians). I'd argue that crime and poverty are very much here.

- Define the wrong objective. If you're marching off in the wrong direction, you might or might not get there, but it won't help you. The classic literal case is someone "lost in the woods" heading away from what would otherwise be nearby shelter or rescue. E.g., a failure to know the terrain intimately is a huge handicap. This applies in metaphorical senses as well.

- Apply the wrong redress (method / process for "getting there from here"). Very common especially in systemic cases where feedback loops aren't well understood. Where a rents-based good or service (land, healthcare, education) is increasing in price, financial support to consumers only exacerbates the price increase. Want to cap real estate, rental, interest, healthcare, or educational expenses? Tax the supply side. (Land Value Tax / LVT, and equivalents.) Direct emergency support for short-term remedies may be indicated, but that is not a systemic solution.

- Fail in communicating / recruiting others to assist. This can be either a communications failure on your part, or failure of those to whom you're communicating to respond, generally a recapitulation of the above steps. Another frequent problem is in reaching out to those who actually benefit by and/or want to prolong the problem, or who are for various reasons simply incapable of comprehending the problem or solutions. If the pilot's incapacitated and you need someone to fly the plane, you find the one damned pilot on board, you don't attempt to aviate by committee with the entire passenger manifest.

- Fail in executing the remediation. Again, multiple possible mechanisms: lack of ability, skill, expertise, insufficient resources, or simply an overwhelming problem.

- Assessment failures. This isn't as obvious but might include: "declaring victory and walking away", as has been popular in military misadventures. False attribution of success, or spontaneous resolution might also occur. The failure here is less for the present problem but in having learnt the wrong lessons for future problems.

I would say for decision makers handling a serious problem or trying to avoid one, a review of both of these checklists in some form would be a good exercise to help them grasp where on the spectrum they stand at the time.